But what love could be prior to it?
What is prior?
What is love?
My questions were not original.
Nor did I answer them.
ANNE CARSON: ‘The Glass Essay’
Night drips its silver tap.
At 4am I wake, silent and brilliantly lit.
The bare blue trees.
My face in the bathroom mirror
is all the ways I hope I am not myself
and discover I am, over and over again.
World as a kind of half-finished sentence.
World as a black night in January.
A thousand questions hit my eyes from the inside.
The man who left first,
his name was Adam.
I hardly remember myself then, or my body.
Our mortal boundaries
grew visible around us like lines on a map.
Such necessity grinds itself out.
Love as eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.
Love as the bars of time, which broke.
I stood on the edge of the conversation,
snow covered us both.
I felt as if the sky was torn off my life.
It made me merciless.
World as I am surrounded by the idiocy of men.
World as Why all this beating of wings?
World as This melon is grainy. Not a good melon.
In the silent kitchen
I tap a pomegranate free from its skin
with a spoon.
Jewel, spaceship, abundance.
Desolation as watching the year repeat its days.
Desolation as scooping up blue and green lozenges
of April heat a year ago in another country.
A great icicle has formed on the railing of my balcony.
It seems to me like a perfect metaphor for heartbreak,
how it grows.
I am cold and without clothes in the orange light
of the railway line creeping behind my house.
I am not a melodramatic person.
It would be sweet
to have a friend to tell things to at night.
Stored up secrets have etched themselves
inside the ice.
Last week a woman was crying beside me on the bus;
I willed my body to generate heat for her.
This felt like a common reaction.
I tried to wear my own absence of heartbreak lightly.
World as girls are cruellest to themselves.
World as my knees are cold inside my clothes.
World as a blue hole at the top of the sky.
I have a photograph taped to my fridge
of my grandmother.
In the hospital, distinctions tended
to flatten and coalesce.
Biscuits, curtains, closed windows, buzzing light.
Sickness as dreamtails and angry liquids.
Sickness as I am interested in anger.
I boil a kettle and carry it to the bath.
The tap gushes out.
I am avoiding my own eyes in the mirror.
It has always seemed unwise to contemplate your face
in the short time following waking.
Promise as the stunning moment one’s lover comes in
and says I do not love you anymore.
Promise as my heartbeat traveling through the bathwater.
I like to believe that something of the heart of a woman
who lies on her back in the ground
is trembling through the water.
Love as the smell of limes and roses blowing in the window.
The water escapes into the air –
this low, slow collusion.