The Muse

It wasn’t raining as you pressed your lips together around a blade of grass, but your thumbs were slightly cupped as if gathering water, and you framed the back garden in your hands whilst we listed the beginnings of what we could see of spring - a bucket of frogspawn our neighbour keeps in the yard and the lamb skull he told us would bring richness to the soil if we buried it, past the cat who watches with silver eyes as insects hover in swathes of metallic. I remembered when the sky was full of bees, and you asked me to describe you as a flower. I gave you a field of burnt orange, the scrub plinths of palette knives and gold leaf on cerulean oils. Outside, the rain was always, so steep, and you turned away as sunflowers do. I want to ask you, which flower am I? Sometimes we are beneath sea grass, my ears full of salt. Later, I wake with a taste for tea with ginger root, some baklava and honey, the scruples of fingers over a bowl of turquoise. You encourage me to talk more, say things - imagine, imagine – even if, to imagine high on a hill where I could be with a thought attached to the actual sky, I would explain to you that the role of the poet is to be a ghost. We now move through the day in presence of a winsome stranger – behind our lips, our restless eyes; walls of scribbled and borrowed words where penultimate flowers are growing each day in colours that permeate, converse to celebrate, delighted and feasted like fruit shaped moons, as in the rain, solid like foil, a thought is so infinite.