We no longer hold hands
because you use a walking-stick to stand.
Instead we slip together afternoons, stretch
across the double-bed we can’t use nights
now you’re so restless.
I lie fingers on your arm,
toes against your skinny tibia
and it’s enough through seaweed feet
to slither deep, not to sleep
but into another world.
My skin is listening to familiar haunting,
little songs tuned to body,
a pulse of openings and closings
anchored where oceans form and dissolve,
scatter and gather,
changing as they remain the same.
I peer at the elemental
extraordinariness of lying there, chilly-boned,
a flame passing through
to do with all I breathe and am.
