you couldn’t invent the tide
or the blood in my eye
imagine creating
a land
where waves
rushed in
once a day
then left
sand
like the bare spot on your chin
I see from one side
and wonder if anyone
else has spied
do you feel that
something
between us,
the sea and the sky?
or are the pebbles in my mind
worn too smooth by
tumbling
endless thoughts
washing nigh
turning over and over and
the way they
swell and subside
not even a hangnail
to catch certainty
just a shallow
goodbye
there’s a place I don’t go
where the rocks grind smooth
a place where dancing cockatoos
sing glitter tunes in hot pubs with
sticky carpet and the clunk of
boulles outside in a warm
pink evening
I don’t abide there anymore
in a beer-soaked fug of joy
the urgent oration
knowing words were
so important
ephemeral
and you
looked at me across the bar
flying on sequin wings
back to the room of my four-poster bed
yet another place I no longer dwell
Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash
Do you remember
do you remember
the minutiae of a world
in the cracks of a bluestone wall
where sparkling bits of gravel
and sand and tiny rocks
would nestle and we’d
trickle them through
our fingers carefully
arranging them in little piles
do you remember
the hollows in the ground behind
curves of tree roots and
small sticks and sandy soil,
leaves and pollen from
fallen flowers, the smell
of school recess
do you remember
our shared and sacred world
created together
our act of mutual dreaming
utter absorption of children
together in something
no one else would understand
but us two
do you remember
how we looked so closely
and loved
mundane sections of ground
or a cut down log,
the whorls in a tree and
scrubby clearings near
stiff iron-squared fences
a place where we conjured
our own folklore of
kids with dusty feet or
puddles when it rained and
slicked down gum leaves
fascinating, secret
but not hidden because
only our eyes could see
what we invented there
do you remember
do you remember?
clairevetica 