My father in a monochrome picture, seated,
a hawthorn hedge behind,
a solar flare in his lap:
the one time he held me happily.
Battle Hospital, Reading.
At the end of the ward a coronal mass,
a buck nosing the salver:
he doesn’t look up as I blow through the window, wailing.
There’s a girl at Madame Mutty’s, down the chestnut walk,
who takes my ear for paper.
She cuts it with a plastic scissors, applies nettle, patent leather:
A child, after all, is a series of separations.
Our first love is always pain.
I see her in the schoolyard, cherubic, clouds forming.
At Alcaufar the Spanish housekeeper burns ditches
behind our rooms; an immolation of grasshoppers.
I stand on a low wall; I scream, I throw stones.
Neighbors report a tongue of flame, smoke snaking his hair; his catapult hands.
There is nothing between the earth and sun that is not afraid of the dark.
A cloud of pink floss races across the chasm, tasting like strawberry lipstick.
I release the brass buckles of her top and she watches,
eyes gapped, as though it needed remembering.
And where growing has made little tears in our skin, we repair them with our lips.
Too bleak and beautiful 