she was temporal;
she poured like a loon and
splashed on
warmer and blanketed white;

the folds crackled;
she disaffected—

that colour,
acquitted in your
smile,

that time,
quieted in your
softness,

that coldness, tacit
in your
hands).

frightened, like colder
clouding sunlight,

like windows
of shadow and blue,

colder
shadowing sunlight,

like widows
of frightened blue

i pasted your love to the window:

blue, clouding sunlight.

curl, wind:
or wind over me—
but closing and hinging
on this bluer softness,
over the wending,
wooden handles:
curl, wind.

—dreamed and
still (it leavened and dimmed, to sea:
anymore?  —

—wrapped and
lamenting (it folded and hushed, to be:
evermore? —

—warmed and
quailing (it reddened and shallowed, and she:
nevermore? —

interred into islands
i ached for your
icicles

and rained.

encoded in
the warmer corners
of pocketed, petalled fields,
blossoms push through earth and mud,
whirl through air and clouds and sky

like you, they
bloomed with the stars and

like you, they
withered with the snow.

she was a heron,flying
under pale,
)
blackened fields of reeds

she was a mallard,floating
under pale,
)
overcast fields of green.

“sway, sunlight,”she pined,
“stay”.

spinning, you were
the same heart beating—

but dissonant: your eyes wandered
over

when you

smiled:
the dark fell away in waves,
your heart still hid away.

reflective in
reflections: sad,
you said, greens and blues,
sad, you wondered,
like a ribbon

i felt you too—
pale greens,
fading blues)

time pressed on my heart like
the whiteness of your tile

;

she was in your arms
my

features
fade

without

sentinel, pines
and pain winding in the dark
i cuddle with the emptiness
and fold with oblivion—
and knowing:
if you had to fade,
the nighttime remains
and knowing:
you were just a relegation of
loveless noise.

shaking through the warm underground,
rising to the impassive dusk:
i pointed out the stars but
we were blinded by the light—

you still stared.

lights flare and colour
the compressions of mislaid understanding

they turn like
spring without flowers
and spin like
winter without snow

they vacate like faded
concrete and burn like
wasted, pressing aisles

they sway like promises
of heartbreak, and crumple
like sharp, reflected whispers

they move like
formless shadows and
imagine like closeness

to you

—i bend:
throbbing
dully

green knotgrass (rising
like a

moon of you)

reflects the ebony
shades of

tranquillity

and the sky dropped in pellets of
sea.

“an embodiment of the oneness of life”, you supposed,
but the moon was cold and the sun had lost itself below
the horizon

“the oneness of life”, you whispered,
melting into the calm.

auks felt like brushes
of yellow as midnight
traversed the sky; clouds
rolled as light
reflections of wisdom and i smelled
their smooth, ebbing trails of
quiet passing.

her palette unfolded like a
sea of roses and you
remembered “trees

and couplets
of tomorrows”:

just enough to feel the
breeze and hear her
gently recede.

coalescing into the night time,
prancing about the dream time,
smiling through another time,
you love for a fleeting time.

the sky was lilac and
blurred with the
pale obfuscations of
clouds;

opaque and formless, you sharpened
the horizon
and i thought of remembering.

consider the folly of a thousand sunrises as
an appellation of your eyes—
i’ll think of moors and massifs as
a reflection of that
buried inside.

ambience echoes in caverns and
caves: i press my ear against
the wall and wait for your
sigh.

who broke the moon? its
slivers shatter on tile and you
emptied them in our flowerbeds,
waiting, i think, for the rain.

you contour
into imaginations and fold (like spring
creasing)

swimming through the
amalgamations and
smiling (like summer
ceasing)

wandering the paths of
lilac, lily layering—
a feeling (like winter
releasing).

whiter upon the flowing, her sounds
rested in morning coffee and echoed
in wildflower honey. i remembered her in
halcyon hues: she
folded down; i crossed and uncrossed;
she smiled at my clumsy ramblings and
i watched the lingering, icy
windshield.

where
love sleeps on goosefeathers and moonlight moors,
withering on the solemn slopes of moss and

heather where
hummingbirds climb on raindrops,
sailing on the pattering and

puddling where
fog layers on hillsides, augmenting
the shades of evergreen, folded and

ambient where
light shines through panelled oak and
purrs with the howl of the lonely sun, speckled and

blurred where
you sigh, narrowly, and long for the tides
beyond forty-five degrees (where it's

cold, i think) where
lorries stop to breathe and you
step, i think, to be closer to magic
and further from me.

while the holocene climaxes
through empty, breezing streets (seeing
your leaves and flowers wither and curl on the two-edged
backlane, loose gravel and overhanging apartments looming
like sharp needlepoints of darker grey)
drops, just streams, coalesce on dark green leaves,
dirt scatters on the phosphorescent, forgotten film—imperceptibly,
rain blurs your lonely photographs (i hold

them in boxes and under books, and
gaze at scrawls where your hand once touched, and
ponder at surfaces where your mind once wandered, and
shadow them on my heart, and
shatter them on my memories).

falling and constant,
one window purple with feeling,
the other dark and lifeless;
do your branches creak in the same wind?
will the feathers and flowers that you blew into the morning
ever find a home?

softness flows over
rocks and rivulets, jettisoning
the clouding embraces of treetops,
holding the modulating fog on brushed canvases:
away, floating away, currents of love.

for displacement of
covers matches the rising, the
floating of your soul — the green
fades to thinner pines and
wilted evergreens, while the snow
piles and clusters in cones:
up to grey, then
small, then
white.

—loneliness; and watching the graphite
scratch and scatter into
moonlight, you spread through
the inky sea and swim up
through the angled crests
of understanding: while you
remember last night's stars,
i stand and stare at the
colours of our ending.

three years and the wild severed
her heart from mine—

and she told me that “the air
had the brittle scent of October”

dreams parallel dreams in the shortest of hours;
we listened together for the advent of rain,
for the unfurling of flowers.

time and time lost held the fragility of her eyes;
now woven, now frayed, her caress
wondered of the fabric that holds the current
of the world…of the crisp delicacy of
tomorrow.

“love is held only by the greyest of skies” softly i replied,
for i knew
that three years and the wild had enjoined
her heart to mine.

unnoticed,
a silvery sliver,
you fade into our shadows,
and descend into our tears.

seldom do i recall the vastness of the open—
your cold invitingly holds me to the unspoken;
beckons at me through that sylvan oaken
world beyond worlds, rising within me, bespoken
of that grandeur through the sky—floating
just beyond the edges of our emotion.

light rain on these shaking hands,
shower the earth below,
ease the darkness of our heartland
repose—if only to forgo.

there’s a cold, electronic melancholia in the
crevices of lighted rooms, in the imaginations of
giants, in the suffocating, wondrous monochromes of the night
in whispered, blinding, broken, dull,
in relief maps, in cold hands running alongside climactic surfaces,
in small, imposing shadows—in model ships, dying reeds and houseplants,
pieced-together wolves, as close an imitation as can be dared, in stained glass, dusty
aves and books and windows, closed, and closed and closed and warm;
cables, flooring, displaced, obscured, scratched-out names and labels and figures and
facts: beautiful facts, useless facts, cold and impersonal, lively and running,
i remember the small smile, that slight wave of your hand as you passed by, but never quite
left me.

—formula for your endings; for these numbers to fade away, bespeaking something of infinity, i hear you laugh; beside you, i am only counting, continuing.

and we see it all, as the waves of futures hazily and uncertainty fly over and above me. we look up to the scores of crying stars, lowering...inexorable rotations, over and beyond, permutations through these emotive colours of the dark: of skepticism? of timelessness? winding slowly, downwards, there's no wild here anymore; do you still hear the lark sing?

cold and moons, eclipsed by the
shadow of that quickening starlight,
of the encroach, silently, of winter
misgivings, and missings;
lost and fallen in heaps and piles of
plated-snow: narrowing and narrowing.

you dare to reminisce at the dimming of the
night; waiting for the silent ceasing of that electric
light; smiling, for the warm fireside shingles and stones of such
delight; rising, persistent, reaching out to set the hilltops crimson and
alight.

lark, perched and persistent,
upon that willow,
and billowing, that screeching wind around you;
and willowing, those branches stretched out to guide you;
and singing, that song reaching out to hold you;
and ages dying, fading away beneath those yellowed branches—
now you wait for the advent of spring, an eternal lament
of slowed, persistent flowing, of pointed, ageless growing—
of wallowing in the hollows
and promising in the branches,
and leaving in the sunset,
and learning in the shade:
she flew away, I think, to the edges of the sea.

hands and bones
disjoint and adjoin these
prefixes, for the hills of your
monoliths align with the lighting of the
north; and over and circular you
descend and ascend, feeling the blue of the water
and the paleness of the sky—and in
night, hanging softly, shrouding, impenetrable
valleys, immutable in their perception of your
calm, longing for the adoration of
feeling.

desert and abandon these
warm and sullen affects; upon you,
a wolf, thoughtful and reproachful as you
shook your snow at the starlight, and pondered
upon the mysteries of the pattering,
puddling, flowing liveliness of granite nothings…

and the turquoise faded into one horizon, the
other expanded outward, catching the humming of
the air, and the soft intake of the flowers…the green sloped
and shuddered through the lens of the hillside, and above,
the clouds shivered as you painted their likeness in the sky.

and the fog remains best understood unspoken;
concealed and silently together, we stare and
silence—only the quiet of your eyes mirrors the
peace of the morning, the greens of the unmeasured,
the dark intimations of understanding.

still, the loss sustains these gaping mouths,
we tire, while you remind me
of the tastes of freedom,
of the colours of lodgepole pines rooted in dry,
eastern soil: bitter
and clear.

and sometimes, you
are like starlight, for you fade
with the colours of the dawn,
and only when quiet reigns—when
shadow overtakes shadow, when
adoration slumbers in golden, curled chambers—
do you arise; spinning, and just discernible,
you reflect on charred and distorted surfaces,
sometimes curving, sometimes eclipsed and
forgotten.

to be unmade, to arise from the
planar and float in myriads indescribable:
the object of your temperate love.

and the highest of tides
crest and balance along your side,
and render these ships asunder
under the dark and pressing thunder.

for i see the warmth in the light of that drowning,
that sparkling thunder abounding,
of rains and passing clouds, only a heart-shaped breach
holds the ethos of your sorrow, always shifting,
ever out of reach.

and it's a cold evening,
the writings swirling on the wandering pavement—
your silhouette hangs on the tail of the lowering sun,
and gleams, a pale reflection, in the water below;
and crescendos of the waxing moonlight seem more like the
hushed whispers of starlight, like the
hushed silence of forest's night, like the
hushed breathing of your heart's bright, like the
hushed rolling and descent of all that might,
of all that stirs the spirit, and all that bespeaks the pensive, slumbering
winter infinite.