Stasis
We wove our chrysalis
from the pieces of silk available to us:
the bob of the river
cut short at the neck of the bridge.
A heron teasing apart the tresses
for bright fish.
Further downstream,
The high noon sunset of dusk-pink petals
watered the soil with the end of spring
as we know it,
the earth exhaling
murmurs of health.
We took each fragment,
however small or frayed,
pulled them taut between our fingers
until they did not break.
Home
If you listen closely there is a language in the crack you patched behind the sink, the cups you cleaned became an echo chamber after we drank our tea black and on the cusp of summer, of optimum temperature. The tea was not wholly itself but a hook, a point for history to wind itself upon before we spoke. There is a vocabulary in the plants you watered; the new shoots and the colour that deepened as surely as the evenings deepened are clearly structured sentences. Even though you said you didn’t get poetry and laughed with a resonance my house did not forget, you wrote a poem as long as an ode and as clear as a haiku in the tinned tomatoes you remembered I had forgotten and the onions you wouldn’t let me chop even though I was crying anyway.
The Kindling 