Could I love you,
if I had no memory
of breathing skin,
of weight, or time, or matter?

(Close to counting
creases in the sheet
that covers way too much of you)

Perfect as the instinct
and the courage
of the painter’s first
and lasting stroke;

(Wide awake now,
caught by morning lust
and light, I watch)

silent as the forest,
in between the lightning
and the first few swollen drops
of rain to hit the upper leaves:

(I do not touch you, yet
I feel each particle of dust,
caught in fever flight)

Could I love you,
if I had no eyes
to feast upon your flesh,
no words to call you beautiful?

Our cells are dying faster
than we breathe.
It takes less than a decade
to replace each bit of then
with bits of some time later.

We are impermanence personified
and yet we love stability.
We feel the moments we are in
to be the moulds that keep the past
and hold the future.

We dig up pots and arrow heads
and take each artefact,
each time-worn, broken relic,
each proof that we are mostly ghost,
as evidence of matter.

A horse is a horse
the moment it’s born.
So are tulips, microbes, stones.

Only humans are not born
to what we may become;
we are not manifest or destined.

Each of us must run
a private, evolutionary course,
before we stop to be mere animated matter -

and some of us will never learn.

A horse is a horse
the moment it’s born;
its grace its destination,

while we must learn to play the part,
to navigate between the monstrous,
near neutrality of evil

and the total, shocked embrace
of empathy that tells us each
of all these teeming billions

is the centre of a universe.

“We open our eyes and stare at the coiling darkness,
And enter our dreams again.”
.                                             (Conrad Aiken)

The wooden handrail on the stairs,
first used by your great-grandparents,
shines like a mirror that accepts
but won’t reflect the lives of
those who went before and those
who’ll be here after we are gone.

The portraits on the bedroom walls,
now solemnly dressed in yellows and browns,
are like our crumpled morning sheets,
our kisses and our laughter:
A history of loss and light,
caught in the falling of leaves.

Another failed evening,
a dinner gone cold
over stale conversation

and on my way home now,
safe in the belly
of city and metro,

I think of the short time
we thought we could be
love’s fierce ambassadors -

and how we have ended,
apart but still bound
by dreams of if-only-yous.

At the back of a chain
of empty compartments,
I think that it’s true

that I never quite learnt
how to stand clear
of the closing doors.

“The skeletons of a thousand butterflies
sleep in my enclosure.”
.                              (Federico García Lorca)

Fire thinks that Shadow dances
like a supplicant.

Fire doesn’t know that when its flames
have gone to sleep,

Shadow fills a sky,
draped with burning diamonds.

I close my eyes and I see lightning
running down my veins and hear
the drums of thunder gather in my wrists.

The outside world is as small
as the hand that caresses your hair
and notes the soft fall and rise of your breasts.

I close my eyes and everything but
the smell of our lust and the sound of our breath,
the whisper of flesh on fresh sheets is unmade,

like the moon is undone by the rooster’s rise
and the land and the sea are conquered in turn
by the same kind of tides that bind our flesh

and carry us out,
like one fever foam wave,
to a place that no-one can enter alone.

“I lift my hands to you. I kneel toward my heart. I have no other home.”
.                                                                                            (Leonard Cohen)

In Reims, I stood within the silence
of the gathering dusk,
inside the Notre Dame cathedral:
A speck of dust, forever caught
in fading bruises of soft light
that fell from Chagall’s
stained glass windows…

I watched the sky above the island
bleed in angry blue red streaks
and saw the palms that guard the beach
shivering like a flight of doves
that felt the shadow of the hawk,
just before the night was torn
by lightning’s hungry talons…

yet neither art nor nature can compete
with these stilled memories of you:
Your hair that moves under my breath,
while you are fast asleep;
your naked skin, so warm and soft,
yet strong enough to rise and bear
the storm of my awakened hopes and longings.

Down by the river,
where we stopped
to greet the sleeping swans,

bats twinkle darkly,
on and off,
between the trees,

like hesitant and twisted
twins of stately blinking,
distant stars.

(I look at you.
You smile – and all
that I can think is,

Marry me.
My love,
please marry me:

My doubts, my fears
and all those years
I lived without you.

Marry me.
My love,
please marry me:

My fierce and lonely pride,
the places where I used to hide
before I knew you.)

The swans and trees still sleep,
the bats move like those trembling flecks
on an old movie screen,

where lovers kiss on a deserted bridge
and hold on to each other,
while the credits roll.

“Leave to dogs and the angels
the music that lies beyond hearing.”
.                                                   (Jane Hirshfield)

‘Stella by Starlight’
Chet Baker live in Tokyo.

So strange to listen here,
alone, to something

once recorded live, so
long ago and far away,

while I write to you,
and while I wait

for the kettle to boil,
and for my thoughts

to gather and to settle
on this page –

thinking of you
and knowing that

you’re real: Real
but also far away,

as far as that trumpet,
recorded in long dead time.

‘Stella by Starlight’
Still live in Tokyo.