Ours


The mountains lumbering over the meadow
like great elephants, their skin a lambent white:
we could have them but every day they are changing.
They are diminished to sparse outlines;
they are sandpaper-skinned and costly.
It isn’t ours anymore, and we are holding on,
one eye, one fraction of each of us
trained on hills that are hollow now –
and as for what lives we live separately,
we spend them cut down to that other half.
                        The train comes and goes
and its wheels sing their screeches
on rails thick with grit and rust and life,
and we sit in the shadow of the station;
we sweat there and we stir our stagnant drinks.
With every dry drag of breath we make it more impossible – and I won’t.
                        I won’t.
You see, for me-without-you the Ebro washes
up and overflows, not dry like the air around you
but rich and moist, the mud from its bank
clotted under my fingernails,
the breeze that runs over it
sipped cool into my lungs.
There is no space in the crisp solid white of my mind
for the shadows of clouds.
The whole world, it isn’t ours anymore –
                                                       it is mine.