Poem of the week: Fruition by Rhian Edwards

A poem that confronts the moment in a relationship when enough is enough, but leaves the reader in life-like uncertainty

• Carol Rumens
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 June 2012 

'Sandwiched in sheets and cwtched under covers' ... Fruition by Rhian Edwards. Photograph: Cavan Images/Getty Images

A poem which treats romantic love as the contradictory phenomenon it mostly is, Fruition, by the young Welsh poet Rhian Edwards, displays a 21st-century impatience with lyric closure. For all its song-like rhythm, the talk is tough, angry, humorous, and questioning.

So forget the faint Byronic echo ("When we two parted / In silence and tears"). Nostalgia is far from the initial mood. The speaker, without regret, is confronting the moment in a relationship when enough is enough: "Ripe is the night/ to sever our hips." The subject-predicate inversion adds dramatic pitch and emphasises the paradox. Ripeness suggests fulfilment, sexuality, the "cherry lips" of traditional erotic trope. What has come to fruition, here, is severance.

The conventional metaphor of lovers joined at the hip (which sex makes nearly literal) underlies a sensation of flesh parted by steel. And yet, after the further metallic, clicking consonants of "locked" and "unbuckle," and their unforgiving mechanical associations, the word "kiss" is a soft surprise, because the plosive of the more obvious rhyme-word, "lips", has been hovering in the reader's expectations. Though shot through with assonance, the poem nearly always dodges straightforward rhyme ("covers"/ "lovers" being the exception), just as it dodges emotional certainty.

"Ripe is the night" becomes the demonstrative "ripe is this night" (my italics) in the next stanza, emphasising the speaker's now-or-never mood. In the ensuing lines we're led to believe that the lovers may harbour guilty secrets of infidelity ("come clean and confess") but this is a tease. It's "the fruition of boredom" which needs to be admitted, and perhaps it's a harder admission than infidelity, since it's intrinsic: "the equation of us".
Carol Rumens' full essay here

And here is the poem:

Fruition





Ripe is the night
to sever our hips,
to unfurl the locked fingers
and unbuckle the kiss.

Ripe is this night
to come clean and confess,
to unshoulder the burden,
admit we want more than
this fruition of boredom,
the equation of us.

Ripe is the night
to let lips re-acquaint,
to talk in nostalgias,
exhuming I love you's,
sandwiched in sheets
and cwtched under covers,
resuming our throne
as the meant-to-be lovers.

Will the night ever ripen
to slice us in two?
When the kisses core hollow
and the mattress sags sallow,
when the sleep of your face
is decrowned of a halo.

Ripe will that night be
to rip up the twinning
and become whole as a half,
leaving love and its tedium.