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Each time I lay a place the cutlery will be changed as if something fiddles with the setting, adjusting flowers, splashing scents, replacing the sneeze of mildew with saffron and vanilla, wiping dust from the gloss of fruits.
And in all that I am careless the cupboard of stale bread lives again with warm yeast, sour milk sweetens, shirts dry in the rain.
There is always a light touch to our heels, guiding our steps, as I kiss you in the starlight. And I notice the gift of miracles in the trees of the dying orchard, the soft cork of rotten apples hardening with new skins.
When you enter the room a low burning candle adds to itself, the wine level rising up the bottle. The waiting bed already has a pucker in new sheets, a dent in the fresh pillow as if they want to try love once more, holding the sunset through the night, blushing our skins.
As if this first falling in love draws them here, ancestors finding their selves in our play- those can’t-help-it, home-sick, love-sick things needing it all again.
The orange tile-lino and ochre walls, rosy evening heat and your sleeping body filled the tall mirror of your bedsitter as I rolled my own, leafing Rizzla papers between smooth fingers- straggling tobacco and loose grass at each end to be teased and nipped. Or the time I rolled ciggies for you on the small of your back, the plane of your sacrum iliac, tickle of finger tips down your spine. Your cough and shiver.
Before I gave up there were the delights of picking flakes from your navel, adoring your bottom and hips, the way your fat gave with an ocean’s ripple as I turned a perfect cylinder. Or when I rolled you the looser sleeve of a spliff, sealed with a transparent saliva kiss, there was that pensive concentrated moment before you disappeared behind the dragon plume from your nostrils, rushing into the greedy dream: a windowless warehouse bonded by the docks, dark vaults stacked high with bales of pale leaves.
The yellowed paintwork with deep hearts of nicotine burns, the crumble of ash between your sheets, hiss of a loose hair on the hot tip, there was our rush and high as the sun transformed the unmade bed into snow and gold. The better part of love you claimed was the silence afterwards, in the depth of our inhaling breath. One day I decided just like that. There is still some part of me addicted to your scent, what we gave up.
Drinking me under the table on our first date you rummaged in your bag for cigarettes as I wedged myself into the corner of the snug, focussing across the Guiness on your thin beauty and flow of your finds: half a Mars bar, a carmine lipstick. And as if this was to be a good sign you placed in my hands a velvet pouch, nap caught with the fluff, and I could feel inside a fragment, the puzzle of a rotten golf ball or just a stone. You revealed it to me: your father’s arthritic hip, the lump of bone neatly sawn by a surgeon pitted with the fine craters of a distant world.
A silver casket on the mantelpiece of your room, the ash of his body in a transparent sachet, you wanted me to hold him- the dry grit of a desert through the plastic. You still linger, sleepless, in the pink mirage of the great deserts where all bones must go. You claimed to drink like him and holding mine wanted to know what it was like to have balls, what it was like. I lay in your pink sheets, a sensation of silk and sand, listening, lingering in the pale before dawn where fathers come to stroll.
1 As I blow and ruffle the down of hair growing in a fine crown from your coccyx, you arch your back as a sapling does to the wind. And if I look close a branching pattern climbs each vertebrae to the nape of your neck before leafing into your pony-tail.
2 Ovid knows the times of change, the tease in the first breath of an approaching storm, flood or fire. Choose carefully your chapter before sleep, you could wake as something else.
When I wake you drift on, the tail of his satyr in the wash-and-care label curling from the back of your knickers.
3 Even as I touch you leaves are veining under your fingernails, new bark still smooth and tender has a beauty blemish, bud and twig.
I’ll have to find somewhere to plant you, hire a drill to cut through concrete, take out the floor, glaze a section of our roof, research the right soil to fill the hole, the fertiliser for the lustre of your leaves, your blossom scent.
Our future lies in the growth of your horizontal branch, next year it will be strong enough to take my sleeping weight. And in your first season you present me with our first fruit. Ovid would be proud.
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