The light that pivots away from us
at your point in this year
makes you gorgeous and sleep
and always returns to you,
through the ellipse coloured
red for winter.
And the possibility of loss
is the sharpening edge whose peril
cuts your benefits
out in strong relief, it also returns,
not as habit
but as force that drives the work
that drives away death: this love of the earth,
this shining hot exuberance that needs
everything indifferently. The 24th
returns us to each other, across
gaps in sight and distances
which aren’t so great, treats
the vibrations as the motor blocks
tick over. The things are all just two
kinds, everything in the sky
feeds them, nothing
is indifferent. We are two kinds
made not in each other’s images
but recently, and then our bodies slide
across the pure mathematics
which rule their orbits, becoming less
than one, a continuity
which can be trusted
to keep
returning, whenever faded, through the red
that casts our love in relief
a halo holding the whole system,
a field of work, a starry meadow,
a human, you think
you’re the gift of all the gods you see around us.
