Pwdre Ser

how does a memory rise

smoke palms in the sum of voices

cool air driftwood balsam

and never returning

the singing shoals

salt sea of summer fingertips

hesitation prints on old bottles

emptied and left by the door

we kept nothing of what was held

imagined we were coursing home

so adrift in our time

a clock racing its own footsteps

the old cottage forgotten

reaching back if only for green fruit

the great whale's fossil

watching from the embankments

its heart torch murmuring

before the hole in the garden

a windfall of apricots rain-flayed

across the abandoned veranda

cold hearth and the heart-fire gutters

the pieces overtaken

breaching skyward in burning reeds

perched in the clavicles of the scrapyard

sooty hands pulling arrows

desperate messages

into the distant jelly

of trembling stars