What was true in November was no longer true
by April. The buds had puffed up on the trees,
had exploded and now were falling down.
But small comforts remained
i.e. a drawing of a line
persists in also being, actually, a line.
I plot it thickly on the map
between the quadrants we each occupy
my hand childishly unsteady, pausing at
and then extending past your point
over the cliffs and into the North Sea.
Since the phone call
I’ve succumbed, like a character
in a 19th century novel,
to an unnamed sickness
that’s confining me to bed for weeks.
I attempt succumbing to another future
less plagued by this two-track mode
of sight I can’t shake off. One eye traces
the world’s shapes, insisting on flamboyantly
bucolic colouring in every scene. The other’s layered
under images of you. A hologram that flickers
but never manages to clear a path to language. Why
is your name sounding in the street like an alarm
that everyone ignores? On the ascent
you realise your pockets are unzipped
and if that truth persists come loop-the-loop
then everything that’s precious will fly out –
might harm a passing thrill-seeker below,
may even cause them death. Hello? I’m repeating
but in reality the water’s flat and grey and cold
and the horizon’s a bad joke about a line.
Blink twice if you’ve received these faltering
communications. I’ve sent them from the past for you
like light that hits the retina too late. Hello?
It’s November and I’m succumbing
to the calendar, succumbing to the real-time location
of proposed elocution. I’ll build for you
a matrix without images, please come visit.
It’s contextualised by verdant blush
in all surrounding hedgerows.
I thought you’d like that. To be inert,
to be impenetrably soothed.