An Inn in New England

I can see it like I’m standing
among the watercolours,
warm light creeping
across old parquet,
smells of nutmeg
and pumpkin.

You carry the bags.
We’ve been talking
about distance,
the length of hands,
fingers, cut off
by a thoughtless neighbour.

I look at the flowers,
begonias, drooping
over the porch,
at the square hearth
beside the thing
that you are,

how wide your eyes,
those dolly features,
too self-conscious:
the way you say
‘back east’
as if you belong here.

No one else notices
the limp blossoms.
I wonder whether
it will be so bad
when there is no one left
who remembers.

Harmonics of Insomnia

The air is alive tonight.
It pulses over bare skin
a tangled mesh of static
fusing into brain and bone
the crystalline spark of wakefulness.

In this soundless palace
any vibration has meaning,
the tautness of a silver web
capturing the slightest harmonic,
the price of seclusion
in a world turned silent.

A note chimes out,
reaching as if from the heart
of the universe,
one tremor followed by another
then another.

The infinite hum is ardent
in its reverberation;
I am made an antenna
delicate as a cat’s whisker,
to wear it like a Mugler gown
absorbing each frail echo.

Peer

She had forgotten to open the window. The room was hard and stale when they arrived though they remained incredibly gracious about it, so it was put afterwards. She should have been well-regarded, having spent whole afternoons drawing a line that demonstrated a third dimension despite the angle constantly muddling between second and fourth, with harsh sunlight streaming in all lead-tin yellow.
They merely noticed the absence of flowers, reducing her to an abstract state of feigned memory loss: how they laughed when she confused theremin with thermidor, unaware of their own absurdity because there was no one willing to point it out which meant it didn’t exist.
We were supposed to be travelling through time by now, hopeful that the version of ourselves meeting them would be the ones who were philosophical about the whole thing, not the ones who bit their thumbs and heard themselves talking about the idiocy of musical lobster like that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Reflected as Elizabeth

Flesh slackens further from the bone,
gathering, unseen yesterday,
now jawline curlicues
drawn in pale ash.
Elizabeth.
Golden collar
sails over rigid frame.
Where youthful beauty may wither,
I’ll forge the heart and stomach of a king.

The View from Here

From here I watch the crossing,
the track shows
the train goes
somewhere.

It speaks of adventure,
of daring
potential.

From here I scale sleeping fences,
lissom sinews
puncturing
stillness

where nothing moves,
just empty lines
heading
away.