Repeat

thirteen.

So we lived by the water, eight weeks in the winter

Where skeleton leaves rolled in waves at our feet

And heather curled and cowered from snow-licked sea.

Where foamy-mouthed trojan armies claimed the shore

Biting at our heels.

In that patriotic blue craftsman cave

We threw open the creaking windows

Paint ribbons peeling, clawed from their frames

By those creatures that shyly stalked our glowing rooms

Watched our pale ghost movements set alight

Watched, behind a carbon paper night

We liked the cold, you and I

It was simpler that way.

And the stars were just paint thrown unconsciously 

Across a velvet sky

Unto the delicately arranged freckled amber in your eyes.

I liked even the sandpaper hair

Of your jaw scratching my neck

The incessant glaring from the wearing leather chair,

But it grew heavy.

I dragged myself, all marble arms and fractured ivory grecian gown

Down to the sea

Whitewater whispers of a sunken grave guiding me in

And was I afraid?

There was the stillness of you hanging back so far behind me up the beach 

I felt you there waiting for me calmly, to return into the deep

To crawl beneath the sun, and would I look back

Or would I refrain --

And would it be simpler that way?

Then there was the moment when I felt the cold finally 

Finally saw my breath drift, used up 

And free of me 

Would it remember

The heat of me,

A shy and fumbling child?

And reaching at your chiseled hands with my finger paint gaze

Finger paint glazed curtain quivering between us 

In those bare water front rooms

Would it remember you?

Then -- the torn hem of my dress, dragging, dead weight

Sand-caked on the ground,

How comic the largeness of your faded blue sweater 

Looked on my shrinking bones 

And I was afraid.

Afraid of ghosts looming now in shades of grey,

Weren't these ashes once so many violent flames?

Afraid of me, of what I'd done 

To me, and to you

How we'd consumed 

Whatever we were before the sea,

And what the sea might make us do.