It began with love and poetry, in conversation
where the language of the body
signals and receives. Time, too, was mentioned -
casually at first, and then with the passion
they had felt when talk had moved beyond
a common interest to intimacy, where time
was broken down into frames of years, of where
and when they might find each other again.
It soon became a game. For three days
and nights they talked and made of love a story
without closure, telling it from chairs in a pulse
of hard industrial light above the city, and later
in bed, under cover of neon skylight,
the story moved from folly to seriousness
neither wished to claim. Poetry was there
in all they said, in how they moved, alone
or inside each other - free verse for the laughter
and a villanelle to contain, formally, the sense
of loss and longing they could feel and hear
already, as it moved, without pause, over
difficult terrain, leaving markers, taking aim.
Someone left and someone remained.
A space was made in their absence, in their names.
There are no words for what happened in between.
by Anthony Lawrence
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| Difficult terrain © Jennifer Phillips |
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