We read chipped plaster, hear a clap’s multiplying echoes, rue that technology lost on bath-tubs empty of rose-water.
A parrot-guide takes us up a mound of time; we come down a little alive, having asked the right questions, shown cultured distaste of love’s shit on every cranny.
Time’s espionage sticks to the walls like a thousand invisible ears; to think we came this far to breathe, scandalous lovers, meticulous in our pretensions, defences on.
But we couldn’t be too wary of crumbling things, roots tearing into last solace of dream, this unravelling terror of nests;
a ruined fort that was a ‘we’ for moments-- a dumb you and me in that flight of bewildered pigeons,
wings thrashing on stone, trapped in the thick silence of dead halls,
until with some effort, hurling dust behind, symbolically we’d flown towards the tombs.
*
US
Like a formula, this shadow-play on the wall; the frozen clock redeeming another winter with simpler lies. I’m trying to resist the urgency to write: the time we met, our gracious apologies as we went our separate ways.
You spoke of stars; dreams you didn’t know you were dying of everyday; the planet you wanted bequeathed to animals, its true inheritors. And then to have collapsed into some talk, tongues rolling themselves around an absence of our shape fumbling into birth.
I remember your incredulous eyes asking me whether I’d believe this was possible, having met only that April.
See, it’s just November; I’ve walked into myself already with books, sedatives, a NASA video where they zoom square sections of the known universe (five or six times), to come to a speck that’s the Milky Way;
and the alchemy which eats everything to space but an image of our shoes lying awkwardly on the floor like islands of light.
