larryhammer | “remembering you running soft through the night / you were bigger and brighter and wider than snow”

For Poetry Monday:

New Year, Carol Ann Duffy

I drop the dying year behind me like a shawl
and let it fall. The urgent fireworks fling themselves
against the night, flowers of desire, love’s fervency.
Out of the space around me, standing here, I shape
your absent body against mine. You touch me as the giving air.

Most far, most near, your arms are darkness, holding me,
so I lean back, lip-read the heavens talking on in light,
syllabic stars. I see, at last, they pray at us. Your breath
is midnight’s, living, on my skin, across the miles between us,
fields and motorways and towns, the million lit-up little homes.

This love we have, grief in reverse, full rhyme, wrong place,
wrong time, sweet work for hands, the heart’s vocation, flares
to guide the new year in, the days and nights far out upon the sky’s
dark sea. Your mouth is snow now on my lips, cool, intimate, first kiss,
a vow. Time falls and falls through endless space, to when we are.

Duffy (b.1955) was the first female poet and the first Scottish-born poet to serve as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom (2009-19). (Yes, this is late. I add things to the end of my queue when I find them.)

---L.

Subject quote from Pictures of You, The Cure, and yes ‘wider’ not ‘whiter’ per official lyrics.