Perhaps' revolves around the inability to translate desire into action. Its dreamlike quality makes it a fine example of the correlation between the imagination and the erotic. De Souza uses a language of utmost clarity for description. De Souza veers off to describe the waiting women behind the lattice work, almost as if the end result could never be anything but inexpressible. Behind the lattice work the waiting women cry oh and stroke their breasts.
Realistic documentation is a tool the poet uses to undercut emotional involvement.
Within the drama of the poem the reader is unsure whether the poem is about passion at all - so cleverly is desire controlled. Nissim Ezekiel and A.K. Ramanujan at one end of the erotic spectrum, Jeet Thayil and Makarand Paranjape, post independence younger poets at the other, reveal how the language of sex and the function of the sign of sex has changed over the years. While the older poets assign positive values to the erotic encounter, the younger poets assign lower values of revulsion, grotesqueness, caricature and anticlimax. Thayil's 'Working Girl' and Paranjape's 'Miss Gobble' are set in big cities with their potential for desexualization. Walking off, I leave you on the bench tidying-up.