8am
you are sat at the kitchen table wrapped only in an untidy sheet, rays of sunlight ripple
& stir in your hair and at my feet. a great yawn is accompanied by the stretching
upward of your willowbranch arms (to your left a wood-pidgeon flies into the window,
the view is of housetops sending up tendrils of smoke)
the wind has howled under these doors like an unwelcome stranger and taught us how to
pray. we have walked on the blacksand in the rain and emptied sea-treasure from our
pockets. we've had parties like our parents had, put your mothers favourite record on as
rosy-cheeked girls, not entirely real, press lips together. by june this house is ghost-
skinned and pale-boned but when we lie together we are warm,swaddled in paper-fan-
delicate bodies. what will we be, and who, without sprawling oceans & vast waves of city
between us? when i arrive you'll whisper a low hello with eyes glad and big. alone (but for
the dry smell of sunlight coming through the factory window) i'll hold my hand out to you
as though guarding something precious (because love, now, is altogether more than an
awkward word)
this is the house; pears, apples, three plums, a few figs and daddy's long legs.
seven days to hang up the skeletons of dresses, to unpack what belongs into cupboards
that are rusted at the hinges. four medicine jars of driftwood, shells and kelp, pelagic
diamonds discarded readily upon return from the afternoon. two trips to the ferry berth
for an icelolly, watching for seamonsters with lightning shutter click barefeet run, run,
run along the wooden pier. it inhales with the tide as the weather is shifting. dusty
wishes collect on the window panes with the lacecotton ease of icy-ness.
