Proximity

The other lives are closest
in the heat. When we unshutter
the house, when sleep comes

and goes in the skin warmth
of the garden, even barefoot
and in its lightest shift.

There is a passing between.
Somewhere in the close fugue
of musk and clockwork.

Somehow, the spored dark
is punctured—a tiny syncope,
the merest finch-heart lull.

The knowing bursts in us.
A seed-split, then a tender
vining of lobes, the fibres

tonguing upwards, shudder
to completeness, unsealing us,
in surges, from elsewhere.

How else do I know,
like the nape and milk-breath
of my dreaming child

what it was to bear peonies
for all those last miles?
In the silvering dead

of the waded spate, to hold
still and nurture a goblet
of unexploded softness

to weaken almost enough,
but at her father’s door,
even with unraised eyes

to see, at last, her unseen white

to taste her rust

her deep and vanished red.