meditations on the death of summer
fog curling
off the water makes me feel
like falling
off the world; some-
times it’s damn hard
to feel at home here,
the drips of our lonelinesses
bubbling up from a depth which,
in august, is of consequence
to no-one. the sky is as oppressive
as oblivion, a smoky mono-
chromed sheet where
the saddest lines are typed
in a cloudy times new roman
and tossed in God’s wastepaper
basket. we dream
of dragons and decembers,
snowfallen starlight, autumn’s
bittersweet gold like sun
on dappled saturday
mornings, like the flamed tendrils
of my strawberry hair
in the dark field of absence
behind your closed caramel eyes.
love by the river in springtime is a perilous thing
the sky is bruised
with purpled patches,
gauze of white cotton
cloud strewn unsteadily
across the southern horizon.
many have come
with their beach chairs
and their expensive long lenses
to watch the herons
chase each other round
the naked winter nests
in the farthest branches.
i watch them watching
from the pipe bridge over
pregnant waters, the little islands
sunk beneath the brown and the rushing,
tree roots emerging from the current like
strange seabirds that reach
for the sky. from the squawk
on the other side of the river,
i know the herons aren’t
in the trees. they’ve found higher
ground among the shallows and
play their love games, as we do,
amid the rocks and the shadow.
epitaph for the soulless
there are
wide-eyed whiskey
truths that trace
velocities, backward. this
was never about you,
the unfrozen intensity
of a moment stretched
into a night, a pair
of nights, sub-
aqueous drownings
in a river that knows too
many mornings,
inconstancy of under-
current winter
horizons & jagged
edges below the smooth
dark of summer waters;; an
itch inside my skin i
bury deeper with each
rasping handful of you
and that the sunlight won’t re-
wind; this,
this was never about you ex-
cept that it is.
