Category: Love

It’s June and sweltering.
The kiss you left on my lips
is dying down.

Everything has changed.
The window shows me clouds
that have not altered,

the sky is ablaze yet refuses
to stain the light.
Meanwhile your morning progresses

and under some other light you’re
tapping out data,
or singing quietly to yourself.

Beyond the gate a man continues sweeping,
collecting fallen things. I contemplate window glass,
quietly fracturing on its own terms.

It is what
it is. But
what is it?

What it is –

Some soft
tautology

whose two terms
are touch

Time to give, time
to give myself up

Early spring
the first winds
the north roads
smooth
but towards you

Then in the morning’s grey light
the train
monotonous
tiring
but towards you

Right through the city
and right through
my life
but towards you

To your voice
your being
your being you
towards you

punctured into the real
by your lips

on my throat, making
presence

the only possible

your touch a friend
I am getting to know

in intervals

All of us crammed in there
like buffalo standing before water at nightfall, looking ahead.
All of us shadows and shapes, quietly shifting.
That day being your face, and the constant threat of rain,
the air seeming thick as the ground. Your face
being the saddest thing I have ever seen.
Then the weight of our footsteps
outside the church.
The soft tread of us, our press into the grass,
temporary craters on soft earth and proof of us being alive,
a dissatisfied herd breathing quietly, waiting to act as one.

You hate yourself when the object that defines you, or at least you
think it does, is lost or broken. It makes perfect sense: you are the
one who is lost and it’s your own fault, having left it behind in
a stranger’s room for where else but in the room of a stranger
would you leave it, inadvertent, shoddily careless, the enemy of attachments. Or it is that you, or they, rush through the room in a hurry – slow
down you hear someone say – rushing out the door
or past each other in the street so many months later, knocking it into
a thousand pieces, glass shattered on the floor, the frame twisted,
a strange disfiguration replacing the face – the photographic paper
marred by shards – and it’s not only the having done it that one
must live with – one’s own arm thrown carelessly through the air –
but the evidence of what was meant to be.