Friday 10 February 2017

Sea Change

by Amy Hughes


I miss you. Or perhaps,
it’s you that’s missing from me.
There’s a drained ocean
on your side of my sheets.
I’m all aware, in all of me
of the vacuum that loudly breathes
in the falling dark
those cooler nights
when I shut my curtains before the sun’s
gone out, and lie awake
in searing, undernourished light.
Sometimes I feel drowned
in thoughts of you. But my honesty –
cruel and sharp-toothed thing –
suggests it’s just a feeling I am missing:
that peculiar filled-ness of the spaces you exist in.
The way a room with you inside
suddenly brims
with lights, shifting, and life
and the feeling we felt
on that purple-skied
and premature-moon-lit night.
The desert slept under the stars
but to our itching eyes
it seemed to buzz. Bare terrain
it seemed to us back then:
pale Martian ground receding
to oblivions too far to see.
I miss the way
your body filled these sheets.
They say every desert
was an ocean once, but the sky
that bleeds around my curtain’s not the one
we kissed beneath
with lights, shifting, and life
I can hear it breathe
and rasping taunt into a restless night.
The rains will come, and drum
red earth into a sea.
‘Til then I starve.

You are missing from me.

No comments:

Post a Comment