As sleep passes between us

Here's an old favourite by Jamie McKendrick - as taken from his pictured 1997 (third) collection:


The Embrace
(after Valerio Magrelli)

As you lie beside me I edge closer
taking sleep from your lips
as one wick draws flame from another.
And two night-lights are lit
as the flame takes and sleep passes
between us. But as it passes
the boiler in the basement shudders:
down there a fossil nature burns,
down in the depths prehistory’s
sunken fermented peats blaze up
and slither through my radiator.
Wreathed in a dark halo of oil,
the bedroom is a close nest
heated by organic deposits,
by log pyres, leafmash, seething resins …
And we are the wicks, the two tongues
flickering on that single Palaeozoic torch.

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Jamie McKendrick (1955 - )

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