Category: Love

You asked if I could bring you something.
I looked around the room, I racked myself,
for something, to give, and meaningful –
I’m used to aiming high and thinking big.

You said, like yearning and possessing,
like thoughts and words, feeling and words, the moon,
compared to Jupiter, from here, up there,
antipodes aren’t always compatible.

I understood the things you said –
the way that symbols can outweigh the thing
that carries them, how symptoms can’t escape
their cause – but somewhere in between your

request and my response
I saw some things are incomparable,
the planets and the stars, nothing and everything,
a look deflected, one that penetrates,

feelings and words, what I would give, what you
would have, that some things stop at what they are.

The night isn’t dark but my world is dark,
Stay with me a little longer.

Your hands on the back of my hands –
that’s what I’ll remember.
Before that, lightly stroking my jaw.
Like a woman training herself to love me.

In the other room, the ghosts of our pasts
putting out the light we live by.

Your hands on a chair perhaps, stroking
my body and the wood in exactly the same way.
Like a woman who wants to feel longing again,
who prizes longing.

And then, you are holding me because we are going away –
these are statements we are making,

not questions needing answers.

How can I know you love me
if I cannot see you grieve over me?

 

We spent our time together
happy and sometimes speechless,
ignoring the phone,
coordinating our breathing,
pressed slim by the weight of touch.

Come to think of it
our eyes would meet
and we would read each other, our skin,
studying it like a script
we had to learn those days, by heart.

We didn’t leave each other much,
just the invisible ink of our hands.
But I can’t help remembering
the way we held each other –
your hands in mine, the drumming song of our hearts.

I can feel the pressure sometimes still –
your fingers against my chest.
I feel it now. But I still don’t know
who gave my memory of you permission
to touch me, when I try to sleep.

We use our armour to shield our eyes
from starlight and flares,
but it’s no use. Even in silence
something keeps us awake,
lodged in our minds, painful as shrapnel.

In seventy year’s time
everything will be gone.
No one left to speak of us
although speech hurts, a flake of rust
in my mouth in place of a tongue.

I wake up each
morning wanting
you.

First, it was your
lips, then it was
your hands, now

it is your heart.
Now, it is always
your heart.