flat.fish.flesh

Your love’s become a dance for twos or fours,
transported by the song to old parquet.
Us couples, arm in arm, flock to the floors,
turn easy arcs and circuits, step and sway.

Dance master has commands and we will swing
ourselves about our partners close at hand.
This twisting time is bent into your spring,
unwinding with the strut to beat of band.

In interval from pluck to the next strum,
sweet drama re-enacted by us each,
takes pause from urgent motion, waits to come
back with that pull into your tender reach.

Our ordered cycle finds us back at start,
again to form your love into an art.

A copper shadow cast across the street.
Your yellow skirts all fallen. You laid bare.
Some soft decaying murmur at my feet.
No breeze or broom to shift fresh leaf from there.

In scattered patterns covering the lawn,
brief ghost of green, alive and burning bright,
is radiating colours from that dawn
and waiting to be swept away tonight.

Four feet can scuff a trail right through calm scenes,
they’ll roll your fading prints into a mess,
but what of summer dreams now smithereens,
though held still, felt and thought out, nonetheless?

The image left by leaf’s begun to rust.
Go find its beauty in the year’s bronze dust.

The time it took to loose the look of you.
I saw your smile on other shoulders here.
So strange to see her stranger in my view
and gaze into two eyes again that near.

An age of days is gulf enough to drop
a face from love into the flood and fall,
to sink until restored by glance at hop.
An instant, unexpected. This recall.

Sharpen your knives for the feast of the year
and take heart from the slaughter of autumn.
Unleash the quick blade on stalk by the ear
and spit roast that fat lamb. They will all come.

This slow yielding crop, as daylight unwinds,
is bound to the land by many fine strands.
Its harvesting heart that’s found in these lines
beats, bleeds to this step as slowly it stands.

The dance of the cut cuts firm flesh and fruit,
it waters itself in the juice of the years,
crams pockets to bursting with September’s loot,
forgetting for good last Springtime’s lost fears.

As Jupiter’s jazz band play tribute to fall,
filled to the full with red berries taken,
in descending notes they send out the call,
cry “Celebrate all that months have given.”