AND SO THE SAME EVENT SPREADS
OPPOSING BRANCHES
Early vervaine tisane. A little bite dissolves. It’s a beginning,
bait.
Early expectation all potential waste. Poppy seed, blueberry,
kumquat.
In the dark, a sundial says nothing. Opaque, unknown to
myself. Tender breast, cell of patience. Tentative tenderness,
as cells divide.
Heap of hourglass sand. Mind merely prickles, pecks at.
I entrust my sleep to the ocean I hear out each window.
AN EMPTY MEASURE IN MUSIC
That the dead could linger. Measure to the first knuckle of
my littlest finger. Hand-worked guipure, light wool for a
shawl. My body a shroud, lost all, lost all. Flicker, spark and
softest fall.
I count the beats in stillness.
Slattern with cups and spoons and days, I wish for fields of
thorns, of waves. Carve out covetousness to leave only
longing. Desire without envy, eyeless blinding. Bed of tangled
leaves, a useless binding. Turn and leave this waste uncrossed.
I wait to lose you, already lost.
THE BEAUTY OF BEINGS UNLIKE THAT OF
OBJECTS
Both knowing how I wanted, even broken, what she hated to
throw away, we wrote daily. Fountain pen, bitter ink, tentacle
across this letter. Mooring cable, tell what came next.
Enough, she says. Let breathing be enough today. A
reflection, alien as if I’d placed myself in the framed vision
of a doe.
Odds against the imperfect. In comfort, every friend’s
mother says spared.
I could not say I had a daughter. I had a syndrome, missing
chromosomes nature mostly culls. A colleague tells me she
studies what for me was a sentence.
I had that, I answer. Lost it. Her.
Four weeks, opacity staved back the Norns. Morning an
array, a rain. One hand measures what the eddy reclaims.
Windfall, a gift of losing.
Not every godsend is a bargain. Lucky break of the last elm
branch. Friend, we walked the beach bleeding, spoke and
smiled through that red.
***
Photograph of Bronwen Tate by Kelly Fletcher.
