Important Dates

An echo bounces in a tunnel of yesterday from 1989

Somehow, 2 or a million years ago – March, wasn’t it?

Soon you won’t recognise me because you didn’t really look;

Your face suddenly vacant and animal-like

Beneath a ladder to Act III, the poppies watch and listen

Blood red, small, harmless and violent.

I didn’t sleep well last night

On the wall I nearly fell off

You were too close, orbiting and perplexed

Lips dry like rings of ice

We needed that damp late-Winter earth

To ground us, to saturate everything in colour then remind us

of honesty and the necessities.

They were expecting the crescendo and your private story

Revealed. All we had to do was show up

As the sky, trees and flowers stood there

beautiful, deaf and dumb, the seasons

played chess with the constellations

The strings, the wind section, the colours

Moistened by loyal promises of Spring

And all I could do, flower-like

Was allow everything to flow from my eyes as

The path let us walk, and the brooms asked to be made

And the date allowed us to taste

As I trembled, blaming a chill in the early-Spring air.

Nothing does matter, we both concluded

As we were given a glimpse of something

Much bigger, much wiser then

We’d like to think we are

1,000 years ago, the brilliance of the gravity we lay in

Was already taken.

We almost looked at each other again like

Strangers in the grass, a green butter staining my lips

A peculiar lunch with a hungry stranger beside me

An absent-minded friend, a brother, lover

For whom bristled kisses are brand new and brushed

Away like yesterday’s crumbs.