A paper cut through the print of my thumb the edge
of a Dean Young chapbook red the smell
of the air above a freshly ploughed furrow
after a heavy rain the tube train stops at Elephant
and Castle metal shrieking as the brakes squeeze
the taste of blood on my tongue licking the ridges.
From the platform a young man looks up
through black marker graffiti hair the undersides of
branches,
and I try to work out if there are two of me
reflected in the double-glazed panel as we enter
another void. I envy your fullness,
despise the pull of the moon on my bones, my flesh
as it edges away from itself the silver-
green sheen of aged beef slapping
onto the butcher’s block.
In the cemetery three days later I read him
a poem The Comforts of No One
Listening and a scent rises from the page,
old cloves in a tin box the vermilion of my blood
of his blood staining the long edge of the paper,
letters collecting like jackdaws over a newly sown field.
I run my cut thumb across the valleys of his name
and feel every angle a magpie’s breath small eddies
as warm skin approaches cold granite and I tell him
about the faint pink line the infant quickly growing
in your womb your blood my blood his blood and yet—
From the foot of a marble angel a crow chatters to itself
about the weight of guilt stone feathers sharpens
its beak on a fold in the robe. On a radio Louis Armstrong
whispers of a wonderful world his voice blood orange
on my teeth corten steel and pith pink clouds
gathering at sunset conkers prised from the fruit
of my chest hollowing with the reverberation
of my lips pressed against her fontanelle counting.
She is you in every way that I wish I was not him lying
deep in the frozen earth preoccupied by the ice
expanding where marrow has long melted. I am
the corona of his eclipse the watermark
beneath the cut glass tumbler the bruise
edging beyond the tortoiseshell frame.
