after Dianne Seuss

I who have loved the practical
have fallen a bit out of love
with the practical.

I had never
looked with hunger upon a man’s back
in a dark room. My first mistake
was believing what I did not want
could not destroy me.
Last Sunday I realised
the terror of an open mouth —
what I was capable of
with your fingers circling my neck.
You have to tell me, you said
not knowing the extent of my unknowing.
I could not tell you anything
except your name.

No, not only that —
I also begged. It’s too much, I said.
‍By this I meant dismay had gripped me
by the hair: I knew now the sweetness
of subjection. I could not reason
with that knowledge, and sensing this
you said, it’s me.

You. My whole body unlocked,
maddened by twenty hard years.
I can’t live up to the girl
in your teenage memories.
That girl had her eyes closed
in order to survive, and now
I have survived nearly everything.

Have you been happy?
I have, and I think you have too.
Yet here we are. At Communion
we both turn our knees and let
the holy pass. Neither of us
has due disposition to receive,
only to give. And the sun continues
to pass over us like a mother’s hand.

Here we are — I’ve taken to burning incense lately. I buy it on the internet and it arrives wrapped in sheets of murderous plastic. What else can I do but chuck them in the recycling and bear the slim coffin of sticks aloft, in my hands, into the study, where it slips unobtrusively onto my desk as if by accident? As if I haven’t, at this middling hour of life, fallen prey to marketed ritualism? Devious. At this point I think of you. I wonder if it was all a trick; if in the end that’s all we’re doing to each other, with each other, for each other, playing tricks. And then I’m rearranging things on my desk as if wilful beauty will make the ritual less of a farce. The incense box says Japanese Cypress. I light a stick and watch: it doesn’t self-cannibalise like a candle. It transmutes, gummed powder and wood into ash, matter into equal matter, and then it crumbles. It doesn’t do this with a candle’s inexorable drama — slowly then all at once — but in clean, quotidian intervals: it burns, then it dies, and then it burns, and then it dies. As if at any moment it might pause its dying, hold together a little longer. And each grey death lies curled at the base of the burner like a worm. I wonder at how the end had come so soon for us, so suddenly, with my taste still on your tongue. Why? You don’t owe me an answer, but despite the world not everything is about debt. What do you fear? Me, I fear never finding it again: specificity. But perhaps everyone settles for the general in the end. At the end of my life it will be your young face I see. Herald of newness. Herald of possibility. I won’t send you this letter, but you might end up reading it one day regardless. I hope you do. If you are reading it now, know this: my answer is yes.

then when will we break into Eden?
Night the snow rushes in silence,
day the angels are burning.
Our hope is the in-between.
But you are shackled and reeling
from recent escape. Hard, isn’t it?
Get a grip. I love you.
I have waited long enough.
We are perilous and overdue.
Come. The hedges are breachable
where desire burns through.
Turn and kiss me on the mouth
and we shall slip in all at once.
Look — the sun begins
to remember why it was made.
The angels are draping their eyes
with charms. Minutes now.
Forgetting is past. It’s not too late.
Who would blame us
for being happy?