‘Réunion’

(After Apollinaire and Neruda)

In the painted dome of this hour of this morning,

Both of us are blue and gold and breathing

With eyes interweaving across no pillows.

I follow your relief from the curl of your cheek

Down the run of your back

Through the seconds of lack

To feel your brain in your toes.

You seem to show me only your blood blushing

In the breeze brushing against the room-tone.

We are empty exiles in the city-square,

Alone with everything.

The time is coiled up like a gift

and no-one is outside the window.

Our hearts knot into an ampersand

Before we’ve been recollected.

Hands sink into sync as the weather cycles

To death in a few minutes.

The great face is renounced to the point

of open vowels, and nothing of you

Turns away or seeks to seem rejected.

Our breaths are short but smooth,

Confused but not uncouth.

We both are clicked into the news.

And every kiss and every other touch

Bears the need to feel reinvented.

In thin layers,

from this moment,

the detail radiates through

a meadow,

an island,

a cinema,

a cemetery,

a caravan,

a cathedral,

a pinnacle,

a pleasure,

in a golden age

of hard leisure.