We’re hand in hand and walking, down where the Camden canal runs away from us
and breaks faintly in spires, under the floating patches of, olive tree, street lamps.
She shivers on her cigarette, smoke watching, a furnace strong and foreign,
like the swinger of the incense in Rome, tracing flaming rum trails.
The bird living in my ribcage beats it’s great and terrible wings
again, and has another. I have her cold elbow fit my palm.
The pigeons obliviously sleep to the draw
of that burning London moon.
The draw I feel moving me.
down into the world
that acts as a cellar
to the one we know.
So much colder
than the heat
is, in her
~