2.

When he has gone out
silence is a drift
of regret.


His odour still pauses
and what might have
been said
stands naked by the
watching window


as she carefully
arranges ideas
for the day


and what she must do
with hours and abidings
and the preparation
of small sentences


as if
their marriage
might be a
fragment
of forgettings.




3

Water is the wine of time
as it clothes
the closeness
of her nakedness
and balms

but downstairs
the frantic silence
and what love
is this
untidy
solitude,


this empty
kettle,
dirty
plate,
cold
seat,
dry
closing?




4.

Perhaps he will never return
and the accident that takes him
will heal every future hour


and she will learn to fly again
and become the sky again
and find another
tree


and nest.



5.

Meanwhile
the knowledge
of a field;

wind knowledge
and barbed wire
and nothing gate
and bark beginning
over and over
as if God did not care
the mirror moon
and the owls
about her body
and the flying
and the way
she speaks
to their necessity
again again again.

6.

She might write winds
she might dance rain
she might whistle sorrow
she might sew wounds
the glass of her blood
always still.


7.

When he talks to the horse
he does not use words;

head down into the nettle light the fields folding
and everything he sees an event that he cannot stop;

even the pigs know what they must do and these walls
have winds and tracks fall back onto the stones of memory;


within his father's kingdom he is lost,the one who remained,
planting in the same places,the orchard heavy with voices;


when he talks to the horse the lichen silence moulds maps
and the sky comes closer to tell its stories.



8.

She does not write her story
in and out of the hours when he is away and lost
and the small rooms play their games
to remind her of the lost children and the hidden toys
and the way earth betrayed them all and the stubborn
stay stay stay that has become a statement of stones and
a stale ritual and it is only the owls that she might inform
and she would speak about the fall of each season and what
was rose time and winter song and how days became heavy pages
in a book she never read and how he spent more time with the outside and she knew he could no longer enter her and the bed became another
silence,silence,silence as if there were snow there and ancient darkness and slate dreams and rumours and small anecdotes of derision falling.

9.

She does not know why she returns

the owls have nothing to say

the night hides everything

her being there becomes its own territory

as if no other place might let her in

as if she might never leave here

and the man never discover her again.

Copyright © David HW Grubb, 2009