this old town

weeks whiled away in the naming of cloud formations

downcast requests for the eyes of the fish on ice

grouped in the cardboard dinner catch basket like capers

capering as your bike, with its clownishly warped front wheel

seems to double back in erasure as it wobbles home –

you’ve taken to wearing a name tag that says JONAH

and the fish eyes and clouds are one in way you can’t say

look down your nose – the white plastic is cheap and rain-warped

look down like the cross-eyed people inhaling posies

up on the hill where the weeds are miniature sunflowers – 

where the sky is so near it's absurd to stretch longingly skyward

absurd as stretching for a fingernail –

an acetate dome of caramelised ash

below which, somewhere, you are, you are also ash

and below you she waits like a jewel to be disinterred

from a world so hardscrabble and not-this, and alluvial

                     a catfish with half its whiskers cut to jags

but, immaterial, you can only drape her in your pall

she falls to the ground and scrambles like a solider

from the gas cloud and shrapnel of a sworn enemy’s love.