You and I are an animal with its own body.

I poke it, hoping it will sing.

Instead, it whispers half-stories

About the barren places within us,

The tender, shrivelled,

Smudged and squirrelled away parts;

Those we know about,

Those we don’t.

The soft belly of our animal is plump and velvet and

Hurts when I touch it

Because I am gentle.

Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

Endings too, closer than they appear.

Once, the road streatched out before us,

Past the cypresses,

The shepherd’s hut,

And the wild mallards huddled by a dark pond.

We were going somewhere, I thought,

But the destination was uncertain.

Then we passed the cypresses and the shepherd’s hut and the wild mallards,

And found ourselves by a great lake.

By our measure, it was as deep as it was wide,

Because we could not see the other end of the lake,

Nor its bottom.

On a windless day, the lake is flawless glass

And in it you see the whole universe, perfectly shimmering –

Closer than it appears.

Lifts that stop at every floor, watched kettles, a microwave minute.

Airport security and automated call answering.

Obedience to traffic lights, obedience to bureaucracy,

Obedience.

Hunger.

Summer’s slow approach,

Starting all over again, from the very beginning

Living out questions that may never be answered.

An orange dream descends upon the city.

I stand at my window eating the last mandarins of the season

On the first day of spring

The brown buildings make desert light of the sunset.

Below: sirens and skin,

Arms, legs, chests, necks, bellies,

Finally tasting the air

Hungry after their hibernation

Skinjoy snaking through the grid, the steam,

Again the sirens rising up,

I finish the mandarins, dispatching sweet winter.

How did it all happen so quickly?
We’d only stopped by to observe
The lush foliage growing so thickly,
You’d have thought t’was a nature reserve.

We encountered a sign that said WARNING
PRIVATE GARDEN – ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
Without heed, we crept in, non-conforming,
The temptation was hard to resist.

What a glade of delights! It had plenty
Of fructiferous offerings sweet,
So we picked till the branches were empty,
And sat down in the clearing to eat.

As we chomped on our ill-gotten plunder,
A terrible silence ensued,
And the both of us started to wonder
Why the roots had begun to intrude.

Round our legs they were violently snaking,
Our arms they had bound in a vice,
Then with a calamitous quaking,
The earth swallowed us in a trice.

So now we lie here decomposing
(There are worse ways to go I suppose)
The last thing I’ll say here in closing
Is watch how well this garden grows.

Coffee on my tongue

Sings a tune that vanishes.

What about this life?

Digging, our bellies slump soilward,
Coated in dirt.
The sun warms us, and we warm the earth.
That is the order of things.
When the dog days of August descend,
We make dens and play at being wolves.
Our noses tell us:
Go towards the dark mystery,
It is cold, an infinite sink.

After dinner, the night summer-bright but dimming,

We sat down to unpick the questions that dangle

From a ripening life.

Sliced them open, made jam for next year’s breakfast.

Lying there on your nightingale floor,

I remembered the time we walked for hours in the rain up to Mirador Britanico,

When they told us that there was nothing to see,

That the fog would not relent.

Now in this apartment, I still hear the whispers:

There is no grand vista, just going and going,

Going and going. 

A kitchen where the solarium once was,

Three of us (a decade later, a different constellation)

The butter softening on the counter.

I watch a squirrel excavate

The choicest bulbs from your garden,

Brushing the dirt from her harvest.

The price of this snack: a patch of flowers.

Both of you polishing toast racks before breakfast,

Gleeful and fastidious. 

We sit down to cold toast,

Now in its silver cage,

Reviewing each slice, each year on display,

Letting the crumbs fall where they may.

don’t come to me

on a moving truck or

in the crush of a festival crowd

and expect me to hold your heart,

keep it from spilling all over

when you didn’t even bother

to place a lid on it.