you didn’t quibble over the potatoes or the oats or the galway wheat yesterday; for today

we are satisfied looks at each other, we eat what little cheap stew, so lean it soups bouillon

like something black and rubric, you my safeguard, sleepwear in mid-morning, unfastened;

 

you keep the wooden spatula as a ladle, oven mitts as placemats, over the warm griddle

for our hands to stay warm; all overall married flavours; all that wets down this reluctant

thin-bodied night feeling at once persistent right and necessary wrong; where’s the moon

 

tonight, you point past the embankment to the rising lake, almost functionally fluxing;

they should know our longings, you say, because they hide from their own; they’d know

the seduction that solicits pure acquiescence, our quiet of rising, falling million rhythms;

 

in three downings a bottle of dunphy’s premium, its malt a handwoven mellow, two hands

on shoulders, then flushed, playful strokes down my back; poets relinquish control

over your gaze, your emotions, your sentiment never open affection; how you disappear

 

from our meetings, companionless encounter in your room, headset music in willful blasts

there’s flamenco and salsa, algerian to african, sudden hot mix, funk, trance, happy house

removed like you when anger makes you a large ire, your quiet admonition a branding;

 

your mind city in clifden, its small farms still strangely benign, unruffled, a plainchant

you admit you’re the urbanity of me, a structural soundness, phrasal breaks on an ibiza

daily missal but ruptured discipline, our kitchen unseen as tuam, as sugar-beet sweet;

 

tomorrow you go to goa, then malacca where you’ll see francis xavier in a different lean

maybe you’ll stand at the waterfront like a watchtower; maybe you’ll hear old begging

stories of miracles and take them to heart, more secret sacred corroborations you need;

 

of acceptance, of redirection, a broken mica and demonstrative of more lost answers

of reading ricoeur together, how he broke the frame of the line, lyric as undone, figural

as shared memory, dislodged chesses flung onto the river below to float, frayed nerves