All the harms of time
are here, in this memory:
I was once in your arms.
The sea moved, the moon

began to grow its horns,
the wind glanced at your
tears, then looked again,
and they were gone.

The sand, whose body
we lay down upon, was
glass under our heat,
a fused and continuous

sheet of light. Getting up,
with rain, salt, and sand
in our hair, we were quite
the pair, leaving early. Then

the sea, the land, the air
underwent their surgery.
Out of them has been cut
all thought of you and me.

STAMPING DAYS

I am a bureaucrat stamping days.
At night, she visits (no longer here
but in the past). Time says: go on,
assuming the arid bed of memory.

I must clear out her skin’s taste, such
curvature, to inhabit a possible future.
What was can burden us overmuch.
I lie in our other nights, where we lay.

AFTER HARDY

I thought of Thomas Hardy —
how he missed his wife,
wrote about the places they
had been to, together — went

back to them, after she died.
It must have been difficult
for him to return then, there
to those spaces. To feel time

again, when it had mattered,
and she was real, not simply
like a hand’s condensation
on a window of your train —

which passes all familiar stops
to halt — finally — at a station
where no one you know lives.
Then I thought about myself —

certain loved ones — memories —
which, for whatever reason,
stand out from the rest, remain.
What will be said of all these

upon my death? I would like if
another could revisit my places —
recognise days, rain, their faces.
Would someone do that for me?