Category: Love

I don’t feel loss. Nothing is lost, you fools.
I’m only crying because this boat won’t stop.
I’m only sad because the running sea’s so deep.

I want those clouds repealed,
These stars rewound,
I want this ocean lit exclusively by hanging planets
Larger and better than moons.

Perhaps then we might strike land again,
And come ashore at Greenwich,
And go by Gipsy Hill, and Waterloo, and Lavenham,

Or walk the moat of Kentwell Hall together –
A willow, and a bench – see
The garden shrug the slow mist from her flank
Very late one summer afternoon, very long ago.

What is it about the lavender-grey dog
hanging around the men
playing with a piece of straw
as though it were a stick
while Moscow burns behind them?
What is it that makes her lie
across my mind as if she might be
what all those words were about?

Every shadow has a shadow.
In the dapple a dark speckle, the meadow’s thirst.

Every sorrow has a sorrow,
a lessening lesson, a congealing ghost.

Density of loss;
a, ‘once was’

Grief not grudge. Extinction’s edge.
Last on the late last list.

There is a pang the weight of the sun’s fist.
There is a pang the weight of the sun’s fist

Three years later,
a year, ten years from now,
I’ll always remember;
not why perhaps, only that we were there like that, together.
Everything, all of it, leads back to you

Low tide, a boy picks up a stone
and puts it in his mouth; his father yells NO
and peels it out. This is special water

he says, gently shaking his
body. It may look pretty
but it’s very, very bad for you.

The dog doesn’t care, she prances
in the muck, then climbs in my lap
and licks. Some habits die hard, says her owner

Her wet black blunt smelling like heaven

Every crashed relationship has its black box, the blow-
by-blow account of what went wrong and how,
the crescendo of mistakes that peaks, is for an instant
quiet on its crest of trauma, then drowns itself and us

in a cascade of static. The black box is what survives,
anthracite gleaming in the wreckage where, preserved in anger,
the voices that it holds replay their lifetime of last moments
and speak of how, until the very end, it might all have been

so different, and how, right from the start, we knew it never would

I traced a stitch raised by your absence.
I concentrated on this panel of sky
and wound myself into a ribbon of silence.

I have sat at the brink drafting a lie.
I have held my breath, entered the rooms,
drawn down the blinds and opened my eyes.

I’ve stood still enough to find my own way home.
I died a little when I took tiny sips of Spring
and spared no thought for when it had all gone.

I know all I need to know. I breathe in
the shadow’s scent when it is near
and commit it to my own silent skin.

Everything over the past three
years leads back to you.

I rest on the tilted gate to prepare
for rain, the rain that began elsewhere.