Gillian Prew

The Missing

Never widow, just ruin in bone

in covers of black air,

of flung dust

a dark burst from the gone tongue.

 

The dressed wilt of these fuchsia breaths

weaved away thin from the turning lungs.

 

Living a long, bitten shadow,

fixing the eye to the anchored flower

 

petals of dry light whispering.

No God

 

I was born into the wrong fields. They stuttered

with ever-goldening, the black pulse of growth,

and I played right into their forest skirts

full of bluebells and night time. My house was

smoke and separation,

and lying still with booming ears. I read

until my eyes hung out and the walls softened,

my solitude gusting like a loom-gale.

I styled the damaged bone that held me up,

the ruined blood, the mouth of memories

until my mirror showed a girl ghost           glad

and I did not even imagine happiness then.

 

*

And now the rain comes like confetti

worn from too much wishing, too much

imagining a dress, and my insides remarking on it. A dress

with faithful skirts full of bluebells and night time

where no god ever was.

The Dying Season (for Milo)

 

Pink mouths

the fuchsias have fallen           open and glad

their plucked tongues fanned still on the wintering stone.

 

            And I,

tumbling upon them

with my day-heart and my needle lip

            ruffling them to wreathes.

 

            No griefs

in the quickening turn             the run of things

the birds fenced in by fog and wind

            the browning days

the dug-in sun.

 

            The dying season.       And the rain comes

loud as a twinning sound

                      pooling in the dents that absence has left.