Memory twists in weary knots behind my thinnest skin.
Silver flowers turn to red; dark water fills the light.
You and I walked arm in arm in a dewy April night,
once, after Carmina and resting on the brick wall
beneath the moonless black-mass sky.
I kissed your cheek.
Pull a little harder on the thing that makes me shake.
I could never tell you of these things and their stark shapes:
The blade becomes a doorway, and down the corridor
I hear my pulse, quickened in echoes that pass
and grieve. The night spills full of sound Q I pull
to part the lips of heartbeats, to hear that sad black voice,
which thrills out in music my lips could never speak.
Like spiders falling from the light to hide my face.
Deeper still the tunnelled veins vibrate with old song;
the door lets out the pulse, and blood can sing
of what I wonUt remember, faces and shoulderUs blades
in starless beach homes where I never lived, now gone.
The old architecture rumbles into its yawning sea,
and I weep and ache. So silently fragile things
sweep past us on our imagined island, just pausing
for breath or a tremor or loss,
then clatter like saucered cups into the lost cabinet.
In the forgotten choral night I reached
for you and taxied home.
That was years ago.
Pull a little harder now, love, to release
the word or thing to speak or sing
all those years of nights before whole again.
In six months, three, the mouth will be
a thin white line, a watch-band secret place.
Tonight it is a new-old voice,
an alto rich but full of stones,
and we lift and fall together in
our sacred dress of scars.
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