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i want to find water where water has not been found.

the plates are older than either of the other relationships

at the table.

am I the hero, seeking,

tracing a path to some

dark, unknown center,

both hopeful and afraid?

I speak in metaphor

only on the page, and never

as prophecy.

all praise begins with hiding—

what happened to that book—

that one which we both loved,

desperately, one summer,

i hear guys in suits are making

fruit illegal. they go ripping out

the woman-trees at the roots, calling

sustenance “mess!” yada, yada!

it’s so rare now to find fruit

in the mess. it’s so rare to find

sweetness sticking to pavement.

i slip my hand into your pocket when we walk side

by sidewalk—only half for warmth—you say

you imagine us december, in the mountains—i say,

the awning caught a bucket of rain

for you, left a dry patch big enough

to stand and watch the streets turn

when rain becomes snow. cat curled

in bed early, left a warm spot. now

she’s waiting at the window for you

to come inside.

on the concrete, I found something with all the love left inside,

From one tiny room to another across town,

up and down oniony flights of August stairs,

I carry everything she asks me to, doing my best

to be as strong as her directing finger assumes me

to be. I’m good, I swagger when she asks if a break

is something I might need, and I wonder why I pretend.

What harm would a break do me, heaving and wheezing

as I am, despite my best efforts to hide and deceive?

         It’s admirable, how well this home is kept. Yes, you heard, bit of a celebrity. No, I’ve not watched any either, but in the office they say she was a demon with the duster.

         You’ll have noticed already with your shoes off, the depth of the carpet here, where your toes in winter will sink into the slate-diamond grey shag and keep you from remembering the rubber-soled slippers kicked deep under the bed on Thursday mornings, when you’ve heard the trundle of rubbish trucks entering the estate crunching on the not-quite-gritted tarmac and so quickly gathered the offending sacks, moving from carpet to doorstep and forcing you to maybe pad upstairs, compost bag still in hand, heavy, sodden with coffee grounds and slimy with the remnants of a bag of bistro salad, getting on your knees to tease the slippers out from under the bed, bag spending too long over that rich fur, moisture gathering at the weight of its bulge, precipitously close to dripping. Or the carpet might have you so fooled that you rush outside in the frost, abandoning all thought of shoes, so nurtured have you been by the carpet, that you slide on the strangely frictionless front garden, being as it is bricked up for extra parking, and the rough soles of your feet are too frictionless, softened by the comfort you’ve moved into.

When I lean over

and take a bite

out of the clouds

I taste the

turquoise wall

I ate when I

was four

Crumbling

in my mouth

He told me not to

which was the only

information I needed

to make the opposite decision

and let go.

It’s been obvious for weeks now, the butts piling up beneath the ficus’s leaves or underneath the bed. When I start finding them in the corners of the kitchen, I finally say something to Lauren. She sighs, says she’ll have a word with him. Asks me not to make a big deal over it. Says he only has one or two when he’s stressed.

“He’s a cat,” I say. “What can he possibly be stressed about?”

The clouds aren’t for me.

I thought, at some point, that they were, that I could carve a home out of water vapor, but I would only ever melt through. I would crash from the sky, and I would not be the pretty kind of shooting star but just the dying girl on your back porch. You’d open the door to smashed bits of tile and skin and bones, and then you’d put on that disappointed face and take me back home.

But when I was a kid, and maybe sometimes now, I used to jump as high as I could.

I smoked what was left of my pipe and tidied my house. I thought about how alone I would look if a camera was hidden. I folded a few months of laundry and spackled the drawers. I gathered the cobwebs and laid them onto a plate one strand at a time. I imagined a hammock’s day in the mild sun. I twisted the clock to display a time I preferred.

Rock-pool eyes,

kindling in my cradle.

I suspect he’s fretting

when his arms spasm

but it’s my chest he’s worrying.

Stop-motion moves –

at play or clutch –

his head dips to bone, a plate.

‘I can’t sustain you, son,

like you do me.’