TOWARDS SPRING

I burn with love with my own self,
I both kindle the flames and suffer
them. What shall I do ?
(Metamorphoses, III, 446-65)

February light like a mother's heft dragging
across a foreign plain while you tongue the
errant child whose fingers your raven
away from your silver. Strand by strand,
whispering beautiful, so beautiful.
Even though it becomes a blur,
after a while, who's saying what to who.
How are we different, my darling.
Though you're a pestle to my mortar
and I'm a pastoral waiting to be written.
Didn't you write a poem about me, you wink,
about a man who struggles to keep his shadow
and whose only God is himself? My dear man,
have you not been listening ? I am a tropical fish.
Closing my eyes half a year till I hear rain.
A poem about you will be guns and lemons,
chickpea and ceramic. As in having your cake
and eating it too. It will drown in smoke;
there will be plenty of olives. But the city
is my darkness, you protest, and I am hardly
the blessed tree. Look at what they did to
my ...Shush. Shuuush. I am hardly asking you to
rescue me from my loom. A poem about you
will feign ignorance. It will giggle at its
own jokes. It will have a rising streets of the pubs
whose sparkle is but a mirage funneling the child
to a nose-dive into nothingness. Woman, are you
always this tough ? you laugh. No, only on
beautiful strangers. Here, why don't you let
me curl up on you lap, like a feral creature
that I am. And now, look up : behind those
graven cardboard cutuouts opening to the
landfill lies the East of its own mind, where
you and I will be happy and no more.

The Anagram - Page 45