Desiring Alice

How long has he been gone? it is impossible for him to gauge. After all that has happened he knows that it is not the future but the past that is incredible. He puzzles over its shattered remains. He'd had just one throw of the lucky dice, who knew it would land this way?
Breath rises and falls. Gravity continues to work. His heart does not forget to beat. This stupid body, doesn't it even know how not to carry on? He longs for the chance to demolish goodbye. He longs for everything to have been different, to have killed her in a rage, to have written her story in code in a diary dull of secrets, to have washed her feet in oil and tears and dried them with his rough tongue. Always a sea-man, his inclination is to salt everything: danger, love, dinner.
Alice, the name rolls in his mouth like a pebble, like the flawed orb of a moonstone. Alice, at the lifting edge of evening, opening her mouth and smiling at him, waving, as though she is the heroine of love's silent film. Then turning and burning all his boats. The celluloid curls as she sets the light to each one.
Still, he wants her. In spite of everything he wants the season of forgiveness. He wants the pure peacefulness of her standing by the bay window, looking out, pouring tea into cracked cups, distilling their lives together into something almost fine and old.
Not this, not this chill longing, this glacial angel at his spine, this long laddered lifetime of desiring Alice.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Pantoum: The Heart's Repeating Gestures

I sing to you at last of golden archways
Light falling in lozenges on quiet squares
I sing to you of mystery, shadow-light and shade
While everyone looks the other way.

Light falling in lozenges on quiet squares
Mercy and love answer me
While everyone looks the other way
Like blood leaking from wine.

Mercy and love answer me
Let your voice rise with mine
Like blood leaking from wine
Its all the same to me.

Let your voice rise with mineIn languages that sit softly in the mouth
It's all the same to me
All that is unsaid, but will be said somehow.

In languages that sit softly in the mouth
The thuribler and the boy
All that is unsaid, but will be said somehow.
The heart's repeating gestures

The thuribler and the boy
The body electric and a soul of dust
The heart's repeating gestures
Of oneness and of many, and of trust.

The body electric and a soul of dust.
The hem of darkness lifts and light steps in
Of oneness and of many and of trust,
soft soft she treads, soft soft she must.

The hem of darkness lifts and light steps in
I sing to you of mystery, shadow-light and shade
Soft soft she treads, soft soft she must
I sing to you at last of golden archways.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele