It
What have I lost? I cannot now remember.
I frown at the roads’ dazzle, count to three.
Something I meant to do? Something that slipped
out of my mind’s grip, a cool cup from lips?
Is it someone I lost? But they are found
in branches’ nod, in dusk, patient as breath.
The dead are safe. The living may not care
to love, but they can cough or call, still there.
I try each letter of the alphabet,
I listen at the corner of my eye,
I start to track each room where I had been
as though I had dropped keys, through day or dream.
Then it draws back, forgives and lets me sleep.
I whistle after breakfast, rattle bins.
But it is gone, and you have lost it too,
we listen, leaf through silence. It was blue.
* Alison Brackenbury’s seventh collection is Singing in the Dark, Carcanet. She has recently produced a chapbook of animal poems, Shadow: www.happenstancepress.com. New poems can be read at her website: www.alisonbrackenbury.co.uk
