I

Long is the room padlocked and kept away from the night she left me. 

Feared is the time of the broken bone come from father’s axe the blows, felling the oak that once stood unbroken like vast pictures in dreams. 

The room she slept in the pool our oceans made came to sand but still letting her love reside touching the insides of caves cast aside.

The hollowness of heart not you that knew but only I breeding took fast for another life and preserved the blood, then the bone struck again and again.

I summoned the rage in her room taking for blessing the cutting past, its ale of pain for a sip, you for an artefact hung from walls stoned with red violet red.

The storm showed ghastly through windows washing out your sob, a threat to me, life to be cast gathering anchor in the pit of the stony river.

Fluttering in that soft shroud your hands speak, speak now maiden, sprout new hymns or history, but go not fierce… back to the candied cunning.

Or rub with sand the lilac or douse the petalled grave or make for worms the playing fields saying the words finally. Finally the words drip. 

In the room the vastness of Time pales.

II

What is this fantastic clue from the first parts of my life that I still love? A few still words from the poem burn from the un-lived past. 

The fruit is divided sweet and won with spears, for days you breed and not far goes the house that is bled. 

Remember his refusal of a brother’s share when the nights on wing descended to oak and broke the oar of the ocean jets?

Each rock is parched and parched and the last but listen not to the flickering light from land yet the rain-splaying night catching on.

Go fall to her sounds, she is here, tumultuous in the sea, you have paid all and all to each to the mast that crumbles.

Here take bread and cast the ship a fiery eye, sharpen your hands, go believe the mind is cast from the shadow of the burn that rots. 

All is froth from the sea down below the quickening sound of sand flowing straight to the age of cutting each horse from its hold to follow the lamp to the shore.

(An earlier version appeared in The Thumbprint Magazine).