I close my eyes and sing her name,
shape her ghost on the air.
The trees are begging for Spring.
One lane haunts another in Wales.
This hedge lets in a saline wind
though it’s been fifty years inland.
The river’s genie snags on a thorn
on its way to the sea, vague summers
where time behaves differently,
finds her curled up in a dune,
creaturely in her sleep, her breath
shaping a ghost from a ghost.
Gifting me a young man’s pain,
a brutal tide for a brittle shell,
she has vanished again, returned
to sand, the softness of dunes.
And so these drowned songs
surface in my ear, remember her.
An abstract sail brings her near,
the sea’s stretchmarks in the sand
of a tawny, ploughed acre,
or a steep scree’s skyline
where hawks surf bright clouds
on the bluest day of the year.
I close my eyes in a winter lane
and, shaping a ghost from a ghost,
sing her name.