The filling of space

I tell you about a block of butter softening
on a table set for one and you paint 
a picture in your head, add a knife, a
curtain and shuffling feet and a certain 
grey filter and write — an ekphrasis that 
talks of solitude or silence or disintegration 
of form or salt or substance…maybe death. 
You search for romance in the bleak. For
a rhythm in the emptiness. For the 
impossible. For a return that cannot be. 
For us. Long ago is a place. A place that 
we leave. A place that leaves us. Us.

We examine our lives in spare images. 
House sparrows always one step out of 
reach. Rain. The persistent downpour 
that starts in the morning. The dusty 
hollow in the shelf where a book 
used to be. The order of shoes on the 
rack. Three steps to the refrigerator. 
Two to the sink. A water ring from a 
night that never was. That could not be. 

In a chipped vase on a window sill, a 
single flower, and sunlight and shade in 
alternating stripes from a half-closed
blind: you write of physics and the 
shifting of the wind, of dusk, row 
after row of approaching darkness,
of water delaying the inevitable droop
of petal, of rot. But there is still hope
in the decay. The filling of space. The
movement. The alchemy of despair
into dawn. Of vacuum into want. Of
suggestion into story. Of limbless
hurt into a moving spectre of love. 

Pedantic words circle what eyes see,
what the heart makes up. Language
as mask. Language as shroud.  
I reach for the toast, cold and brittle. 
A hungry verb settles on my elbow. 

#Poetry