I
Who can name the absence
music is, who draw that space,
the cold breath, sudden and empty
that will own you the rest of your life?

In the still light, you put your feet down,
this one, that one, then this one,
again on the yellow earth. Your happiness
was like the trees’: golden and tattered.

Who could you have told? Leaves
fell around you, half shrug, half sorrow.
And the wind sprang up off the water
riding you, fierce, unbiddable, already lost.

IV
The pool stretched from the shallow steps behind the house.
You hadn’t noticed until after you arrived
that it was dusk. And how the land on all sides
dropped away: miles to the valley floor.

The figure stepped out from your body,
arced above the surface, dove.
You might have stood forever, silence
shawling through the air like snow.

Crystal: blue: lit somewhere
from inside its depths. Even then
you didn’t want to understand.
Even then, you knew.

V
All day, the winter light comes striding
down the strait and through the window.
Golden, thick with silence, and you
not knowing how to walk or speak.

This is your perplexity:
was it a hand
that reached up, plucked the arrow
in mid-flight? Or were you all along

arriving here, sidelong, failed,
but currented? A reason
would release you: this is how you know
it won’t be found.

VII
That sound: something in you has been ringing ever since.
And you, stumbling at the edges of yourself,
deaf, bewildered. Was it joy?
You were smaller than dust, dumb

as pebbles. Yes, you’d hoped your throat
would fill, your lungs. But you were
emptier than winter, defenceless.
You could not even tell yourself. And it was then

the flame inside you stood straight up,
tall, gold-coloured; and your heart walked forward
easily, as though something had called it, laid itself
on the anvil of that silence.