Armslength/I Can Almost See You Pt I.
You brought me some tea and yoghurt loaf,
Winnowed from a radiant harvest.
I wrote you a letter,
Birthed from staunch bark,
Wafted through your letterbox
Like a seed on the pining spring wind,
Encapsulating orchards of memories
And the promise that summer might bloom again someday.
We sat under the bower of cherry blossoms
At armslength, the petals cascading around us
Forbidden to touch, yet intertwined,
Like leaves on separate branches,
Nourished by the same ardent roots,
The same reviving sun.
Bees carried their nectar on ethereal wings
From one garden to the next, borne
From hanging plants of ivy and fern
That wound down concrete stairwells
And stretched across balconies
Wreathing blocks of flats in lustrous tendrils,
Embroidered as flags of tribute
Rippling across tenement windows,
And woven into a great cross-pollination.
Daphnes laced between the cracks in the walls,
Scattering and radiating their fragrance into the air,
Flaring nobly beyond any containment.
Long-dormant bluebells sprung forth
From tangled thickets, cultivated now into onion patches,
Carefully tended to as diversion, gleaned as sustenance
Against the towering chains of dread.
Feline footsteps coiled across beds of soil
And pattered softly astray in the woods,
Shadowing the illuminations of enchanting flowers,
The purr of each fleeting embrace
Tender with absent companionships,
Perched as a regal vision upon windowsills,
Insouciant for our arrival, skittish to unseen perils
And reluctant to trust
Earnest in affection
Adored even in unrequited departures.
I reminisced about the fountain sprinkling
Over iridescent tapestries of tulips,
How it sparkled at the heart of a luminous city,
How the ocean flows through us all.
I wanted to wander with you to that meadow
Strewn with wild garlic and daises
After you regaled its serenities,
Fraught still with flashes of when we were lost
Amid the metallic shocks of the darkness
Surroundings wilted by the wrath of winter
Seeking fellowship beyond serrated fences;
The bridge over the river now frayed,
Rocks dislodged and swept away in the vicious current,
Recoiling from the bellow of police sirens
Tiptoeing as if everything were poison
And chasing some distant repose.
You were on the other side of the foliage
But I loved you all the same,
Ached for you all the same.
There in the celestial glimpses of the sun
Streaking between the branches,
The ground tilled by roaming, restless footsteps,
New trails carved, pacing and folding upon each other,
Glimmers of freedom broke through, sprouting
In terrible yearnings
And phantom splendour
As a glade hemmed by miasmic horrors.
Beneath the lull of spring’s flowering song,
The elegy of the wind thrashed through the briars,
Ricocheting from emergency sirens
And spirited, weary rattles of applause —
These threads we cling to through the wilderness.
And I traced them all the way back to you,
Even to the glass we shouted
Helplessly and brightly across,
Cleaving us, shielding us
From the menace of this affliction
But magnifying every fracture, every frailty
Stranded with fragments and pixels of one another.
The pestilence crept through the mired undergrowth
And flung its noxious spores of venom and decay,
Bludgeoning those that tested the withered bark
As through snaring, monstrous vines they forged their way
With blunt and crippled tools,
With no ward but the barbed garland of martyrdom,
The rose thorn of heroism;
Fallen to the burden of unpermitted fears
And the siege of unanswered cruelties,
Long banished and injured
And drowning
With the caprice of laurels little succour
To the shrapnel trapped in the hewn trunk
And the blood leached for gated spoils —
Nurses scarred and haunted as soldiers,
As if the cure were wrought in war.
