Long Poem for Short Love

when out of days encased the old pipes burst

we were inside one another, we were

caught and ambiguated as in dreams –

her eyes were the colour of strong Masala Chai

so stared at they were scarcely eyes anymore

but meaning –

the opposite of the alchemy sparked in a beautiful phrase

put on refrain until it only sounded, looked

felt – mine a snow dog’s, cold as permafrost

the heat of our huddled bodies

wasn’t bent on parting us, as it had been

with others, such that we could have huddled

all day and did, such that I felt her like fresh tea in my belly

and tea just warmer than blood against my skin.

*

it’s later – much later, I hope – and she’s riven by a line

thinking of all the rain that’s ever fallen

she’s sitting on the line that splits her

pinning whatever I offered of me that night

to a canite notice board – a double quilt

requiring a packet of pins to support –

green thread scraps from her static clothes

that the head of a single pin can’t find and puncture –

her hands still too unsteady for that, I hope –

an oversized turtleneck, sheet music, sheet lightning.

it’s later still and she’s in a bathroom, high –

drowning in all the rain that’s ever fallen.

*

poached egg skies and water liberated

from pressure so unrelenting

it was as if the story told was one of a soul

we listened, broke and rushed inside

my fingers in her hair the final words

of an elegy played so often and for more

than mourning – as she moved I recalled

that I could move and that I

                                            was moving.

the hiss of a Disneyland cascade

corners drenched like trellises by ivy

the waterline at her calves, elemental stubble

the barrier laid at the doorway

of towels with which I’d watched her dry her body

towels I’d thought of coveting in secret

corners of her house – a little wet body without edges

covered in filaments of towel

and perfume stocked by a single house in Paris –

then she left to trigger the shut-off valve

and I for a time wasn’t anywhere, wasn’t blind

or sighted – then she was back

her spectral footsteps puddled the corridor

the pipes to every aperture ran dry

and we were so thirsty and so in love.

*

it’s morning and she hurls the full dustpan

at the mirror, before hurling herself through the cloud

she’s clouded by dust and doesn’t brush her hair

out of that storied face

like an ageless girl’s – what she sees

the clearest reflection yet that the line, so frayed

and bafflingly braided will soon unravel –

that the paintings on the wall behind her must come down –

that the deer skull on her bookshelf means more

that more of her speaks from those oddities than she knew –

that she’s an oddity, beautiful to a fault

that aeons of rain cascade in her jeans pockets

for a reason, that as the dust calmly settles

it pulls her brutally towards the ground

and I am there –

it’s morning and the face of the fault of her beauty

is my face, roseate, settled everywhere.

*

we’ll steal like children into automata –

forests await us, but only in that state –

their pine needle carpets have rotted soft

and rotted sweet – plains and escarpments

mirror the way we’ll lie – and us

their arrowed pitching to the rim, their rising –

you, so small, in estrangement from the line

a shallow river urging your lips to open, your hair to grow

your hunger to grow, your hunger for me to grow

your love of birds to open at last from its shell

of fear – your memories to force dead nights alive

and the pace of your heartbeat won’t frighten me anymore.

love a thousand others while I sleep, but wake me

when everything has changed

and be mine.

*

the shut-off left a single drip alone

and immortal, to debunk water myths

of the tiles drowning in nothing

but the air that kept us afloat and sunk us  –

pitter-patter of sleeping prone in the bath

washcloth’s engorged fibres wringing out

after my mother had finished with my hair

a busted metronome, ecstasy, horror, piss –

that was where I was

as she strode away with a cheap new mop

to a place where I couldn’t reach her –

I was in the bath and at burials

I was barely awake as I watched

the drip move the water and then the spillage rise

irresistibly towards her, and with it wafers of black

toenail polish, and sweet drafts of perfume and effort –

it was then that I saw our coupled reflection

for the first time, and laughed –

kissed her until she couldn’t breathe

dried off her feet with my jumper.

*

it’s later still and she studies those sublime

memories of how I smell, how I taste

like dog-eared paper among perfect sheafs

they stick out and she can’t stand them

can’t stand how bent out of joint her mind is –

there are things she’d just as soon take back

as there are confessions lost now for a time

to confess them. there is no time

that isn’t speculative – no line that won’t cut

after brutal speculation – no touch

and all looks into all eyes are halfway gone

towards misreading, incitement of misdeeds –

she gets up earlier now that she’s alone

she wouldn’t care to know I never sleep.

It’s midnight and she’s in her bedroom, crying

and as I watch from afar, my hands in bonds

I think of everyone who’ll ever love her

as innumerable tiny light globes

on a wall in Las Vegas –

the brightest wall for area in the world –

I think of everyone who’ll ever love me

as music without voice or instruments

cobblestones laid too harshly

to walk on without pain

at the gates of a novelty casino in Las Vegas –

I keep us together, somehow, in stupid metaphor

I don’t want her to cry – but hope is treacherous.

*

be mine but be mine second – be yours first

devotedly yours with a conscience, mine with abandon

string fear into my aimless puppeteer’s love

by loving yourself more

turn the eye that sees because it, singly, looks

upon your own – then I think I’ll call to you

the gift with which I’ll consecrate that beacon

that I’ll find as we walk childlike through its forest

or lie or run or float or fly through its forest –

I promise you can’t know another way.

I’ll find it hiding in dewy thickets

in the plumage of beautiful birds

in the egg sacs on fallen leaves

in the taste of the pine needles I chew

in the taste of the soil I brush

from your rained-on cheeks –

all the rain that’s ever fallen

gushes from four pockets now –

in the fogbound path that forks away

from the other, that others have made

to win access to places once forbidden

a roughshod entrance to a garden

so soft and incidental

a garden like our ancestors once shared –

in the middle there is a flooded bathroom

and an unmade bed and a coffee table

a room unadorned except for salt lamps and spiders

plates of potatoes, wicked games and second-hand clothes –

aberrant exhibits in harmony with every flower

every weed, every hour you’ve turned to me

and I’ve known –

somewhere between the garden

and each of those symbols frozen in time

and underlined by blurbs in tongues

never comprehensible, never the same

in hard-won hiding places, ever fearful

of compromise – that’s where I’ll find it.

*

it’s years later and I’m in foreign city, tired

so tired that every passing shadow is her.