On a slow train
out of the Savannah’s sudden exile,
the sunlight swallows me,
a calligraphy of days, hours, minuets, now
inscribed on my limbs,
syntax gives over to a dry, dry sound,
and parched, the aftertaste of sloe gin
inhabits my ribs, the lay of bones,
a labyrinth of absence,
and this velvet ache
at my wrists, a pure burning,

burning the memory red,

words swell and crumble with a kiss,
what absence, Soul of Winter,
what absence is this, spreading
over roadmaps, soliloquies, nights
stretch into mornings, always mornings,
as my fingertips pull daylight from an orange
in dream alphabets that soon dwindle
to vowels, the word, harbour, bends
the old alder beyond what it can bear,

so many ways, you say, to live like a prisoner,

at home, the rooms
are all windswept, reckless
chairs overturned , abandoned
in this, the evening’s parable,
love is no more
than a syllable in a bottle
of shattered blue glass,

a poem written on the underside of a child’s teacup,

their jump ropes curl like adders
at our feet, the thread
from where I dangle
in doorways and twilight,
as I bide time, perilous
over train tracks, your fingers
trace tally marks along my vertebrae,
the hollows darkening in a pathos
of blue rheumatism,
and in the carnivorous tremor
of my body breaking
like the spine of a book,
the paper gone pink at the edges,
like azaleas and bruises,

erosion, after all is the altar of the body,

and there are scars beneath my temple,
and this ache, still, in my wrists,
unbearable when it rains,
ghosts inhabit my lungs,
wrung from the silence of shut windows,
eternal clotheslines and linen
span for miles across the Savannah,
and the early frost is at last,
calling me home....