Riverbed

I learned of gentleness through riverbed rocks 

Ritual undressings

Finding scars like seams of quartz:

white scyth 

you couldn't see.

I saw you in a riffle on the Calder

a sheet of penny brown.  

Learned your landscape with one hand 

submerged; 

wrist split the light. 

I felt the river warp its course to absorb 

the sinking of a limb. 

I grasped as it forked, fingers 

beckoned

whorls of silt.

I feared, at first, to disturb that moss-stitched rock

Or serpentine stone of

red-orange rust, which rose through 

gold rings - 

shattered the sun.

I heft slabs up along the banks, spume-storms rose

around bone-chilled ankles.

I stacked these sturdy structures;

with cairns

built you a home.

We brooded on kindred things. Houses that 

crumbled around you, that 

fortified around me. 

Stone-sure

I saw you there:

I came to tenderness through riverbed rocks. 

Your mother called them hazel.

Ossa

There’s nothing there

on the tip of my tongue

except soft flesh

I’ve explored before.

My skull though: a dam.

Pebble and sand

words worn smooth

on the bone.

Lower. My breastbone;

heartthings grow.

In that cuttlebone

alone: a turbine,

and my ribs, only exist

as beams of wild light;

backstays; burst fierce

from the core.

I will the dam a weak spot;

fissure and fracture from here

on your cheek

where I rest it. Break!

But words only dissolve in the slipway,

or rattle hollow

amongst our teeth.

Perhaps one or two make it through -

do they? I’ll send them direct.

Shift higher in bed,

to press my forehead to yours,

tell you this:

“I’m sending you messages this way”.

My bones are telling you soft words

too hard for my mouth to say.

Cumber

My hollows brought me here, being as they were

on the outside. Pushed through

gooseflesh

by a mudslide of millstones

It wasn't only the then-burning skin

or the cooling rock as it set between ribs.

It wasn't only the failing words as you

glass-eye stared.

I had salted away shale, my collarbone

grew heavy; tried to topple me

in my throat

the cobblestone crowned.

A cumber of rocks that I knew 

to acknowledge,

then sand in my lungs, and the ache

as the sinker plumbed mud.