flat.fish.flesh

I’ll promise you a scrawled out page of green
erupting with your turns, if you will swear
a coat of light to cloak my sprouting scene
and swell the roots and berries that I bear.

Until you’ve been and shone my dear shoots shan’t
break through the frosty muds, won’t litter lanes.
Buds wait instead to open and enchant
the swarms of bugs brought out by new warm rains.

Now March’s soft advances part my thighs,
restoring cheeky pink to this pale grin
that robs cool April of her cruel disguise
by mouthing verse into this body’s skin

My word remains unbroken, ever said,
reciting vows that bound us since we wed.

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.
Your twisting time has bent into a spring,
unwinding with the strut to beat of band.

Between the pluck and the next coming 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.