silent bird

valentine day’s hangover
taught me something i did not know - 
love can come. 
love can go. 

that day i wake and my heart is dense as a bucket of wet ash.

i busy my hands to not look at your face,
Stir some oils in a pan
to avoid you
in a flat three steps wide

i retreat to the kitchen corner
to listen to the ominous silence
of this bird in my chest.

the day is like a frozen river 
where even ever-moving air is painfully congealed, locked close to the ground

and i wonder if this is the sound
of a curtain fall,
the end of the road we share.

i sob in your arms on the forest trail
for your pain and my absent bird,
For the kicked-up dust of this familiar scene -
my dad in depression, my mum in despair

we pick up our roles and tread heavily round,
oxen yoked to the wheel.

in the morning,
the Doom
has moved some.

i’m new to love that’s long - 
i’d never felt the bird leave, 
just like that.

i watch you after love,
still utterly confused that
you’d become a stranger again, a mirage
My latest lone-wolf trick 
to remain eternally so

and then just when i thought i saw you clearer
you shatter it all with tears from nowhere : 

“I would recognize you anywhere,
you know”.

I understand - 
galactic landscapes,
lazy trajectories of stardust shimmer through my mind
as your words obliterate
everything i thought i’d just learnt,

you speak things i don’t remember into my column of fire,
the pillar that knows your immortal name. 

then you’re gone and i sit there unable to move a limb
watching dusk inch across the floor

I still know nothing
about love. 

Photo by Carina Adam