This pre-dawn grey you somehow exhale,
Breathing your soul into the air above my bed.
We are not fast, we are drifting, opaque.
Your mouth falls open, darkness spilling from your lips.
My pillow is damp with your saliva.
My clock’s a shadow, but it’s time
To send you home. Now, before there’s light
To tell your leaving. You’re still my baby, my child.
Love aching slowly across the room. You clasp
The absence where I was lying. Transformed
I flinch from the pain of hurting you.
“Altruistic or self-motivated remains unclear.”
Open to the wounding of your unfaithfulness,
Veiled in guilt. Silence leaks, dusty,
Through cracks in time.
We speak of love as if it were alive:
“The love between us”, “The love we share.”
I know love is this not-dawn greyness,
Slipping over your body, half-hidden in my sheets.
I know love is this not-yet-half light,
Lingering into the day, lost under colour.
I know love is this filmy absence of dark,
Beginning to turn the shadows into contours -
Wandering through the house after you leave;
Only your ghost-arms holding me in the silence.
(1990)
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