If I round the bend again and you
are standing there, it will be lucky.
So, what dumb luck this is – what
a planetary return, the two of us on
heat-scorched grass,
heavy-headed and sick with delay, that space
between then and now – how capacious!
Has just collapsed on itself and into
The prophetic perfect,
inordinate ease finding its way
through the damp afternoon back to difficulty, back to
the unbearable strain of accepting a simple offer.
Back to your forearms, caked with lawn and yew seed.
I came dredged in solar remembrance
of the dark, shallow pond where I sought meaning
and found it: rotten and untethered from everything –
but there, really there, you should know.
And I will tell you about that exhausted place, where a mirage
is the closest thing to a whole picture you’ll get face-down like
that… never mind, never mind.
Working through me now, a dry, weighted
bitch to digest,
and the fellow feeling: Your beating centre, now pleasantly
homeward bound, is still learning to live beneath dust
That sorrowful, ephemeral blanket that you expected
would one day come, had
So, the nettle let its aphids eat and eat
while you assessed the facts, the feelings,
chemtrails laughing into the lucid sky,
the very funny presence of absence
now, all told, leaden gravity presses her thumb over us,
over the August earth, the disenchanted city park
trampled flat and yellow
and you say aloud the thing I have swallowed dry:
How come it feels like nothing’s changed?
Oh, to be the twin terriers chasing their technicolour ball,
who don’t know a thing!
Well, I’ll give it up first: my search for Grace
at the bottom of the puddle was obviously fruitless,
and futile now too is the still tableau
of my imagined life without you, elegant misery
coming undone, and fast, in your enduring patience.
For heavy red velvet always swings out from the wings
thundering shut in the middle –
where else?
The impression will remain, a weather to the room, but
Goodbye and good riddance to the Comedy,
to the scene in the park where two lovers sat.
It will take nerve to confront this pair of real
bodies, what to do with them
In absence of the narcotic sacred tense? That space mediating now
and then called Maybe which always cedes, a tale as old
as time, to the humid question we face today:
What could it mean, a union between us?
You and I in present, perfect–
Or perhaps, just as we are:
Me, in daily resurrection from shallow water
learning from you the terrific profanity of being –
And you, to whom nothing is sacred
but this
Header Image by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash.