Frostbite

That they were warm once, those feet
That carry you off in the other direction –
Cold, clean, foreshortened kisses (and now you) confirm.

That I have known shivers at hand –
The fear of false judgment, of yet being dulled
I hid from you, uniquely, them, sometimes, me.

That I have alarmed every beacon I had
For less than an acquaintance I will not regret;
There was pleasure there too, every pent upon languish.

That they take you away from the most kindly omens
And prove you to be unidentical with
Some heartening love line – I can’t grudge such feet.

Knowing them to have been warm, once,
With tentative heat.

After Sidney Again

Distracted Nature, idly discontent,
Now minded to undo as to regret,
Tracked down her own back catalogue’s extent,
Her pair of voids still in their fading set.
And as she wondered what she might have meant,
Despite occluded sight, her puzzling let
A watery ray fly from its wonderment:
An indecisive, though a worthy get.
A realisation to reproach the past -
An art to turn the easel, blur the line -
Now animates that accidental cast,
That flighting colour that pens in all mine.
When my thin prism breaks up Sidney’s black,
BELLA’s eyes alter, and then falter back.

Lilac Bicycle

There is a melody among the spheres
A modest and untraceable refrain
That furls itself behind accreting years
And waits to watch morn’s mantle blush again.

There is an elegy beside the grate,
A sense of passing bound up with the heat,
That, all the same, vouchsafes another’s life,
And knows its own rekindling in defeat.

This is a threnody for what there was,
A jubilee for what’s to be instilled,
The memory of some once treasured cause,
E’en now not lost, as much as freshly tilled.

This is the hymn for her who wields the dawn
As her conveyance through a land once lorn.