If we are shades

If we are shades
Who walked here once
Among the concrete buildings, on guiding streets
Hot in our skin and hearts
With all the time we thought was left to us

If we were there,
Just in time, breathing still
Our countable days
The words exchanged
The laughter released
Parting defences with our teeth

Would you rather be here
Than where you are and where I’m
Still ahead
If we are bodies
Who lived love
Before we are long dead

(with acknowledgements to Carol Ann Duffy)

splittings

Were you to leave,
I’d fly to New York
And walk the streets we might have walked at dawn
Breathing the stuffy sick subway mist ascending from the grilles
As if to fill my lungs with your dead skin cells.

Were you to leave,
I’d close my eyes and remain unmoving
Among thousands of people measuring in motion
The aching seconds that’d tick your life away from me.
In my icy-cold stillness, hibernating in full sensual awareness,
The knowledge of loss ripe in my womb-
Our child’s non-existence scarring my insides.

Were you to leave,
I’d sit at crossroads
Taking in the city’s energy
Communicating with, making love to, devouring Absence
Transforming the instantaneous into the eternal,
As can be done only in times like these

And then I’d go and buy myself a new bound leather phone book
Write you disconnected number down
And pretend I can still call it


And if my body were to be found bloated
Floating in the Hudson
It’s you they’d try to call
Your number being my single identifying feature

green tea

I take green tea in measures
Of forgetfulness
At times unimportant habitual calm
In liquid form
in a Japanese restaurant
In incense form
from Rome
in my nostrils, in my office
dizzyingly reassuring in its zen mythology

At times when the world is as it should be
Tranquil
In abstinence in pause in preparation
In a prolonged moment of expectancy towards a goal that
Is so mundane as to merit no articulation