From urgent aquifiers, from night’s feathers,
from circumstance’s bent aurical,
we extricated ourselves, held together,
hue-sensitive, metaphorical,
your Augustan incandescence
and my object lessons
passeridae
enjoying the apricity
of an afternoon in November.
Smoked camels designed by a committee.
Zebra crossings I can scarcely remember.
Whatever severs
the cobweb prophecy of Ismenion’s oracle;
that was the end of our endeavours.
The body rhetorical
and desire’s iridescence.
The naivety of pheasants.
It comes to a pretty
pass when a city
devotes an expiring ember
to the landscape of endearment, to a territory
of which it is not a member.
I felt our tethers
like the cables of a long-demolished passarelle,
like a scarf for all weathers.
I should have launched our unnamed coracle,
should have registered the presence
of an efflorescence.
In this counterfactuality,
shorn of any performativity
and of an industrious temper,
you embarked upon the pressing activity
of filleting my timbre.
There, your drastic measures
were a cleric to my hysterical
and your scissors
ahistorical.
Instead, years hence,
making my vague presence
known to the sink’s periphery,
I’m reprimanded by luminosity.
Separate celebrants are attempered
by a symphony.
I’m grateful to be dismembered.
Forever’s
corporate-strategical.
It delivers
desiderium, in Bristol
fashion, relative to our senescence,
the cumulative of all of our presents,
at least according to my sensibility,
apparently;
how a theoretical contender
curses a Jersey
union official at the marina.
Envoi
We wonder at fortuity.
What serves it is also necessarily
that which engenders
understanding chance’s unborn trajectory
as an entirety, wherever time may send her.