I ruminated about us all night,
how we would never make love again,
with wind and water lashing the lean-to,
and in the morning, the downpouring still is interminable.
A whole river tips, heeding nobody.
The sky will not lighten, and I shan’t settle.
I must go out. I can neither stand or sit another moment.
A coat over a coat – the rain doesn’t hurt anyway –
it slews down my head, face and all,
with no hair to soak, to mitigate the flood.
Water doesn’t hurt
though it cares for nothing, stops for nothing.
Traipsing past the sloshing cars and down into the sodden woods,
I pause and clock the weight and height
of the river’s churning guts:
the reservoirs need it.
Then striding uphill, lopsided and urgent,
without even a dog to justify my presence,
I suddenly find myself where the river is flat.
We walked here, that day in June.
The place was incidental then.
A summer spent on edge,
from an anxiously hot and ruthlessly dry spring.
No moisture sank more than a centimetre in,
so a sludge and previously unseen,
reddish rings came into view
around the remaining water at Compensation Reservoir.
Then a hosepipe ban.
Anxiety also hardened the soil in the yard.
Neither of our loves managed to sink in far.
We jettisoned seeds that were fully fertile and alive
but onto heedless earth.
There we are.
And you didn’t help:
Mixed messaging, doubts, the past not letting go.
What with human-ness, your head on my chest.
“We are very different,” you said.
I took that as badly as I could.
All the while, the seeds burst from their pods, silently as we brushed our arms and legs through the sticky willow at Staithes.
Love clung to our trouser ends and caught us like brambles.
We carefully picked our way out of it, thinking it was some kind of inconvenience.
A warning anxiety would not let me go.
And by explaining it to you, thinking I could trust you,
I wounded you.
Again and again, we wrongly heard,
only heard what we feared might be said,
goodbyes that weren’t necessarily meant and so on until,
it became an obstinately loving gesture of farewell,
for you to make this birthday cake.
And you had bought me an ornamental figurine
of a man on an old fashioned bike.
He leans forward to the woman, who tilts on tip-toes.
She cranes up her mouth to kiss him, as far as a silhouette can.
This was meant to be us – obvious – through happy years,
within reach, as easily as our parents did.
It didn’t seem right to give it to me then.
Predictably, haplessly, with August gone.
I long to behold these figurines
as if they were our shadows again.
The seeds are germinating only now,
when September’s solitary duck
follows me in perfect parallel –
no faster or slower,
and with no more sound than the ceaseless pitter patter
on this flat part of the river.
It needed to rain.
It’s been so dry this year and it doesn’t hurt.
And somewhere, beyond these dripping ferns,
a child still laughs at play.
My heart will not mend,
but the water soaks into the soil at last.
And although I couldn’t give a fuckwit’s toss,
the reservoirs will be happy.
