I'm not pretty
Barely alive but
I felt the sunset and
Kissed your eyes. Mountains, aspen
Desert and sky, I heard the day
Go beneath your mind. Quiet and
Inconsequential. You went to bed
In the tent and I stayed out in the
Black rain beside the black lake.
I was beside the pines and estimated
The thunder go through me like stone,
And I could not leave, could not stay.

We could have a kind of farm,
I suggest,
With a little shop attached,
We could make jam and lemon curd,
Maybe chutney or,
Other things in little packaged jars,
I could bake things,
You could sell paintings there too,
We would only grow vegetables,
And fruit,
We would cook things with love,
Labour the earth with love,
Live together in love,
I feel sure that I could work the soil,
I have always felt an uncertain hard need in my bones,
To give something back to Mother Nature,
And I grew up in the country,
So I feel sure I would acclimatise,
But it is only a fantasy,
A sort of a story,
Even though it does sound nice either way.

60 days down the road till I am,
rippling like a pond for you,
make me writhe with wet storm clouds shaking my horizons sending waves,
still me with heavy heat summer days where nothing moves and earth is coarse with love and honeyed thick air,
move me gently with a cool autumn breeze soft mornings strolls,
commence my tides to enter and draw back steadily day after day never quit pushing me out and pulling me in,
the moon and the wind fight bitterly over who owns the water who moves who stills,
But i am tuned to you alone.

I have been thinking about how fictional worlds thread with our realities,
how if you read a book,
watch a film,
see a play,
the subject matter and themes will unconsciously make their way into your daydreams,
I had been watching pride and prejudice,
thinking of Pemberley Estate,
the countryside,
how English hills can flood with hanging low mist,
overcast and soft,
mild, almost ethereal,
or how it may tear itself open,
on ripe summer days,
the ground verdant and full,
I see an image of us, by a lake,
perhaps an old-fashioned picnic basket,
cherries, peaches, strawberries, plums,
feeding each-other grapes,
we could dip our feet in the water,
laze and kiss and,
have all in the time in the world somehow.
I would have a book of poetry,
Sappho perhaps, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson,
I could show you the ones I think you might like,
feed you a strawberry,
read you wild nights,
our hair and hands all tangled,
our words and thoughts entwined too,
and we forget all about the beautiful countryside, and the fruit, and the poetry,
for moments and moments.

There is no fail-safe.
The heart wants,
What it wants,
And oh, I am miles from safety, now.
No going back.
There is no mechanism in the heart,
To bring it down if it overheats,
To bring it down at all, darling,
(But would you want to?
Don’t you like it when I make you heat up?
Bubble over...?)
I suppose what I’m saying is this:
Remember when people didn’t know you should only heat oil in a deep fat fryer?
We would put hot oil in pots and pans and we would leave it there because,
Human beings have a tendency to be distracted?
And the oil would get far too hot and catch fire,
And we’d try to put it out with water,
But because of the oil it sinks and expands and makes the oil shoot out of the pan in a fireball,
And consume the kitchen in flames,
But,
Isn’t that love?