Defining love

Is love
finding solidity in emptiness:
a balustrade beneath the hand?

Or is it
the boy in the car seat behind you,
as you drive up roads known and unknown,
asking ‘where is God?’
Is he love?

Where is love?

The night you married his father
your stomach seven-months big with child,
you wept, as if you knew
the ruby would fall from your golden ring,
like the promises you made each other,
lost now.

When the baby, sluiced into the world
through your waters,
was given to you, red-faced, squalling
to hold close to your milky breast -
was that love you felt?

And, as the world was honed
to the body of another lover – after the divorce;
holding himself still within your deepest part,
was that love, you whispered in his ear?

As, filled with gratitude,
you came and came and came
legs wrapped around him
like jasmine tendrils on a trellis?

The dutiful incantations
at the end of phone calls
are approximations …
you have the airport farewells down pat.

But what do you tell your boy
when he asks
‘who do you love?’
what do you say?

20.10

I am

This windswept day, I am a grimy truck, Sisyphean,
carrying a burden of quarried rocks,
rough-hewn, heavy,
up the M14.

Just before dawn, I will return,
racheting gears downhill, my engine juddering into
the ears of dreaming children,
curled under duvets, murmuring in their sleep.

Today, I am the small bird
that thudded into the windowpane,
the bird whose red blood leaked out of its beak
as it lay gasping on the verandah tiles,
the bird I strangled, judging it too late for saving.

Now, I am the boy kicking his feet out from under
the swing at the gallery
who sees his shadow beneath him on the hard-bitten ground,
and says: ‘I am there, and here too’.

I buried the dead bird
in a hole I dug in the earth,
too close maybe
to the dark-leaved arrow of a new sapling.

My face crumpled like
a torn page
in the hand of a harsh poet.
My tears rained down.

Grief tugged at my throat,
like a baby at his mother’s nipple,
asking for her love.

20.10