Portrait of Nancy Trevors
They sat in her drawing-room amid easeful silence in
tolerant enmity.
The men were three, and her husband was the third.
This in its way amplified his urbanity.
His suavities were of ivory.
He was more irreproachable than her virginal tea
cups.
She gave her lips to the moment, and her fingers
nestled in a bowl of apricots.
The tea was amber, and the pungent lemon and the
blanched sugar
Seized and caressed the eyes as each man took a prof-
fered cup.
It loosed the tongues, and the four were free.
As four portraits on a wall come to life they stirred
the silence with a babbling that gleamed.
The drawing-room was draped in a wistaria mist,
And the flutter of the phrases patted the cheek with
an alien charm.
In but a short while she had become dominant.
And then she wrapped herself in the soothing nerves
of excitement.
The three were lost in the pursuit of fragrance.
Their chairs were their kingdoms, and there were no
other empires.
Archly then her voice dared:
"Will you have another cup, my beloved?"
It was three cups that rang to her, and her hus
band's, it chanced, was the third.
She smiled over her adroit and ample confession, and
it was enough.
She had done with the hour,
And she let the uneasy hush turn to a hodden-grey.
Donald Evans' poem "Portrait of Nancy Trevors" was published in 1920 in the third Others anthology. To read this poem in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link below: