Housesit in spring
They fuck in the borrowed fire-
bath, luck a kind of furniture of heat that floats them while the day’s last shudder of light inks the snow–strange mountain ridge mauve and midnight blue as a love-bruise but still so white, stark against the dun and dark they can still see in the valley
In the morning he bares for her
beside the painter’s double mantle The heat is inside now like a sun on snow that thins it into liquid and lifts it so
In the night they sleep a little listen
to the wind singing through the chimney listen to its blameless whistle to the glass pane loud in its distress a little like music yes and the valley outside in its dark past life is just a thought (or less)
He thinks of shadows circling a face and how to capture it
with film and the white keys and the black keys and the other half of him whispering into her knees He doesn’t toss can make himself a stone for thinking
And she is in another place travelling through fragments of stories
in the deep finds she can sleep through singing
What they don’t know about each other is getting less
they tell their catalogue of failed love stories Who would you have me fight? she says The one who said to call and had her other man pick up the phone who said in five years’ time you’d still be doing what you’re doing now who said your world was smaller than she originally thought who pulled it down in talk
The one who said he couldn’t believe in love
though the night was warm a February a balcony so thick with smoke from their own mouths it hurt to blink who said the word (love) til his lip curled pink and woke your friend whose house you were breaking into pieces outside of
The one who stopped speaking he was low as carpet
in the basement bedroom couldn’t drive you when a speck of metal blew into your iris and wouldn’t wash free so you took the bus the bit of it, stuck, like a splinter in your colour and already starting to rust
A who for every dead sparrow on a painted fence
on the painter’s wall in the borrowed house each in all its hook–hung softness and sprawl the painted feathers so real once you could have touched them all
By Sunday, she bends right over
a woman in charcoal a woman in gouache a woman with no clothes on against the weather a woman clothed in luck Those mouths that had eaten us, she says open up again in paint in story tell them back into the ground
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