our conspiracy of flightlessness

The pictured (2016) Selected Poems of Michael Symmons Roberts is really worth seeking out ...

... here's another of my favourites from within:


Grounded

I

At the edge of sleep,
my head on your breast,
I hear your heart lock
with the cloth pulse

of a skein of geese,
which arrows over roofs
towards the source
of water, dreams, oblivion.

II

Asleep on your front,
your shoulder-blades reveal
themselves as wing-stumps.

Now I know what you
have given up for me,
for this November night,

this moonlit bed,
this sluicing rain
these distant fireworks.

And I think of migrants
on the wing for weeks,
filleting the air with sleep.

III

Today huge tethered kites
- torsos, mermaids, lizards, bears -
were animated by sea air,
as though the next world hung
above us like a mezzanine.

Tonight, I lie awake and run
your absence through my fingers:
here's the touch of you,
your warmth and give,
our conspiracy of flightlessness.

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Michael Symmons Roberts (1963 - )

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