19 Fragments of Youth, Athirst
"Have you feared the future would be nothing to you?"--Whitman
XIX: 2021-2022
Flat muscled and honey coloured, the carapace of memory
sea secrets braid the corners of his ears, now gone.
we flood each other with loss,
we finger each other with loam and detritus from the hovering albatross
light-lanterned, and the flight around each other’s mouth:
the stitching, the unwitching
this black land of grief toward which I face the current alone.
all we once had, and wrote long into the night, now latched,
the dreams dug down and undone,
the same for you?
Hear me NaiNai
utterance of creek and crime, the eel and the fisherman’s keel
a patois of tea and time, this fragment caught up
mercurial as the tide, the goings of our ruins
a spade of undertow
and what was left of you but hair and nails and tossed socks
a pebble fragment
whisp of word, the fens’ hold
all your wonder once ebullient, now this minuscule pair
and a bleep of clacking.
oh NaiNai, hear me, please
M ∞: forward ending
I open
a time of quiet truths.
not forsaken but long left
cuckoo from lost ones and longing
my heart arun in tugging,
the trailing of light and tagging sea
and
you, closed
rivers and harbours and dogeared pages,
bedhead and shoulder sprung, joint bones and rigmarole,
time's tempest now a whimper, all gone.
we both, now long, become land dust and liquor
a whirlpool of light, barking beings disjoined and swaying
we both, embryology and accent and terminus taking, so
we left leafing outward, the phonetics and semantics of land and of the sun,
all of us now, malaprop and false sibilants, echo and cadence,
black and ungendered all, the language run.
