The Day He Met His Wife

She said goodbye to common sense
and so they booked a room
in an afternoon hotel to holiday
with fecklessness in laundered sheets;
and there was an orchid
and a crisp new paperback,
the art gallery on a working day,
a second bottle opened and a third
knowing tomorrow in twenty years
they’d wake with such a head,
a sink full of pots, the fridge
empty as Antarctica
and everything uphill again
in rain you could canoe
the middle of the street down,
which they did.