by Anne Walsh
I.
Your death is a soft, green wing. Velvet spun by sun.
A parrot’s wing. Just one more thing, one more shade of impossible
for grief to jump into like a souped up car. Electric lime.
Vegas neon of a Lorikeet. Your death dresses old school big time.
Ridiculous feather, the pink paisley of a pimp
in a 1970’s detective show I can’t take my eyes off of
such great clothes, so out there.
Memory is a record breaking blizzard.
Colours all the maps SES blue in the breaking newsroom
of this evacuated body. This weather woman, under paid, caught
for the duration on air in the studio.
Just out of frame, the storage closet it really is.
A stiff mop. A bucket with a bit of throw-up water.
I don’t believe my own predictions.
Hope is the unfillable toothless gas tank
of a Buick iced-in two blocks down.
Oh the belaboured point of her non-existence.
Hope is like god now.
Closures, detours, no through roads.
Slippery roundabout this. Again and again:
once I slowly invaded the privacy
of that part of your neck usually reserved
for your shirt just under your collar.
Oh! I was your shirt briefly so briefly.
II.
And now I kiss your neck
under the collar of the world over and over
I kiss and kiss and kiss you.
I’m so drifted with the feel of you
which didn’t leave with you
that nowhere do I belong.
Everywhere I long.
Not being able to talk to you is its own language.
Some kind of sign. A way of not moving. But flowing.
Lake glottal. Snow cuneiform.
I’m walking across the tops of cars.
Some souls that are still here but gone
go to the weigh-station where things already gone go.
And that’s inevitably when they take the picture.
Like of the last Tassie Tiger.
Her back hyper bent, so unlike her living self.
So bent with the lack of bending trees at evening,
those steeples from which everything
called her people to prayer.
She’s not looking at the camera
because it takes everything that isn’t her.
She’s looking at the dead body of her language.
Nothing is able to be said.
III.
I miss your chest. Your Renaissance Jesus chest.
Your El Greco treasure chest a giant firefly
in the backseat of your car lighting up
like a cigarette with wings
when you unbuttoned your shirt.
I took in a lung full of light.
I miss the sky-when-I-was-six colour of your eyes.
The defibrillating blue of when the swing tips up
as much as it can and you become sky.
Now my heart is stopped by hooker boa green everywhere.
The diamantes of summer grass.
IV.
Death doesn’t wear mourning clothes.
She’s New York fashion week.
Bright streaks.
Unbelievable heels.
She’s toucan-nosed.
Bright as a fish.
And everything alive dances with her.
Real Rhumba.
Hips pressed together under open fire hydrants
in the middle of the afternoon.
And she doesn’t run when the cops come.
Never before did trees dance salsa or want so badly.
Everything is alive except for the lover whose love has died.
She’s the deadest thing living, that’s me.
V.
On the sideline trying to hide tears in public,
clapping at the turns of the Latin Champions of sunlight.
I’m not in the comp, but I never had a brighter leotard.
All the flowers seem to want to bloom.
It’s too tiring standing still like this.
And you left me with all the fucking paperwork
the one who is left has to do.
The removalist. The photos. The grotesque necessities.
But I’m in oboe wind that makes my soul
the standing ovation of a pine forest,
an adrenalin no needle can stop the going of.
As alien without you as large Martian eyes in a CIA dossier.
As dark as luck for mean people.
VI.
My soul is where souls already gone wait to go.
The Tassie Tiger weigh-station.
I miss how you put your hands on my shoulders
from behind on your way back to the table
that first day at our café saying yes I’m hereto my spine.
I miss your fingers in my mouth.
I miss us joking with the bartender
because our delight can’t be stopped
and spills like beer everywhere.
I miss asking if you need your hand back to drive.
I would rather have kept holding your hand
and never gotten to this nowhere.
VII.
Words left with you like friends
leave together at the end of a party.
Words, those favourite comet clothes of yours
strewn down the strip of sky you disappeared into
like an owl so silent there were no wings in it.
A jumping branch the only sign you’d been.
VIII.
And all of these words are my jumping branch.
Me pointing to it, shouting like a kid no one believes:
See! He was Here!
This poem was previously published in HUSK 5(Blank Rune Press 2018) and in Mascara Literary Review in 2017.