(VI)

You talked so quietly into yourself
softly, under your breath,
lighting one word off another
chain smoking cigarettes –
each sentence was a soft dense bloom
hanging in the afternoon air
shrouding us both in a thick enigma…

Blue eyes flickered through the glowering haze
alert and vivid beneath your half moon brows
though they seldom met my gaze directly
fixed on the vanishing point
of your own perspective
somewhere in the troubling past
somewhere in the swirl of encroaching shadows…

You would not mention for the world
that blacked out, unspeakable scene
around which your sentences looped and circled
in trembling, smoke borne rings –
just the old ball of panic in your chest
shedding its skins in the hoop of silence
of a raped child’s shocked and rapid breaths…

Listen, I know it can be no consolation
but in my eyes we were unspoken together –
the stars lit their old catastrophe in the west
igniting the ravishing evening
in a haze of blue and violet
and animals in the fields stirred and quivered
their nature a live presentiment of the dawn…

Friend, where do we come from? “…the power
of internalised life stems from memory.
It alone guarantees love a soul…”
Wrapped up in thought, in a fug of smoke,
silence descends remotely
as your thought of the past ends
burnt out in the word’s perpetual cremation…

Forgotten time breaks over us as moonshine…

I scatter the ashes of our conversation…