Two Poems

Another Evening

Love divulged is barely love at all. —John Burnside

It doesn't always have to be like this.

On an evening when I quietly sit in my room
turning loneliness and receding sunlight into words,
chiselling articles, propositions, cutting sentences
into lines, tempering syllables, metre, rhyme, rhythm,
accentuating cadence to memory, intonation with the
emphatic pause, working titles that best sum up
what follows, looking for the
perfect epigraph, something
slowly withdraws into itself, drifting away, abandoning
stacks of books, cushions, old letters, unwashed tea cups
on the windowsill
with shades of a darker,

and the sitting itself becomes
the line I was looking to describe the end—

when I see you outside my window like a shout
heard from a moving train

in a half remembered dream,
or as an echo

refusing to divulge the source of its coming
any more.

 

Martial - Marital

It does not take long, to let whiskey ride
fingers

roving the dry bark of a body,
searching
for burrows to rest.

I see a hairy arm flung over a quivering waist; earrings,
musk, dim light, the pins and papers
from her hair coming off
with the urgency of death.
Somewhere the smell of regret
mingles with citrus from outside
the window, stirring the beast
wrestling a tangle of clothes on the floor.
The bed creaks. A fracture in the forest of silence.
The weight of something that will fill morning silences,
washes off bodies, coiled into one another.
Something other than the hooks of a bra are
undone here.

A chicken is quartered
with a little more

tenderness.