It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
 
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list . . .
 

We leave early, drive for two and a half hours,
park, find the church where you were married.

The sky opens
Blinking its single slackened eye.

She cut letters out of me,
which quietly and unnoticed
danced red poems.

Annette the gap-toothed,
You kissed a man & I was born. You gave him
your laughter & he built an empire,

There is an album of all the men
your mother have loved. It sits every
night in the deep silence of the
basement.

If they ask where I am, tell them: I am
wintering. I have secreted small acorns
of sadness in crevices of gnarled limbs
and shall be savouring their bitternesses
on the back of my tongue until the days
lengthen.

we can travel anywhere
she winks, but let’s rest here
in amongst these words
a moment can take a while