Love, Blue Poles

Monday 21 Oct, 2013 – in anticipation of our 25th anniversary (tomorrow)

The phone rang and an old friend announced a state of cancer,
I’m joking and serious, offer a break up here and grapes, but he wants
a bunch of flowers. I’ll send him some books, a coping mechanism.

This evening you dispatched a funny look I failed to recognise,
then it dawned – you didn’t believe me. I was saying
my ringbarking was working, no new leaves. You said
there are, and with the State of Emergency declared today
you want the gum tree growing too quickly too close
to the forest and too close to our house, pruned right back
I want it at the height to hide the neighbour’s shed.

The house we love is a tree house capturing the fluency of dawn
spreading over the Pacific and dusk folding over the tree clad mountains
exposed across a huge glass arc, with wooden floors rooted on
Tallowwood posts eighty feet tall, so solid I can’t believe in fiction.

This morning’s sunrise from our balcony looked immortal, though I know
a State of Emergency will be declared for one of us sooner or later,
chaos will find entropy and together they will ravage our body or mind.
Meanwhile, I’ve just sent you a photograph I took just after sunrise
of a young roo in the thick of our garden, now finally maturing,
something we must have done somewhere along the way.

And will send one from later this morning, you buoyant
in green glass with flippers for arms, thalidomide refractions
and thin splintered legs, differently-abled but angled in a mermaid pose.
Splashes of sea fleck your face, but I know every inch of you
after so many years, all of you, identikit not a problem, any part –
the way your lips kiss, your nipples between my fingers,
the taste of you, the romance is personal of course . . .

If I threw a transect over the 9,125 days we have loved for
and together for nearly all of them, I’d find the odd mistake, perhaps
too few bouquets of cut flowers, but plenty of laughs and adventures:
canoeing down the Zambezi; dawn over Karnak; your first snowball
in Norway; distant relatives in Borneo; finding the Blue Holes of Samoa
and Belize and the hidden Buddhas of Nikko; getting drunk in Havana
and the craic in Donegal and so much more, and then there’s the poems . . .

We are not big on ritual, like to keep it really, sea, sky, forest.

Cleaning my teeth I start listening to the crickets and katydids
notice the sounds of the ocean, that exhaustion is continually
flooding the air, but not always heard and I’m thinking of you
your warm body waiting for me, a landscape of always.