no site for hunting

I prepare my body to be colonised

(a playful gloom)

mute hands wipe away tears

their functionless extremity

I mend scars haphazardly

spread like a swan

    a harbinger 

a men’s space

I am calm in respite 

cast like iron ore

I/you de-subjectify myself/me

the end and beginning of the body 

I doubt myself in both directions 

this insular cell

I want her name to disappear

she talks in poetry, her feet concreted to the ground

she climbs me up her Italian mountains, shows me her streams

all my names are my father’s 

       every dream is about him

I go to sleep to the sound of murmuring women

(there is no such thing as fallen words, empty silence)

in the morning a bird visits my window

(it has happened before)

clouds cover waterholes and 

I am above them

by the extension of your hand I am implicated

I rest on you

mimicking return

the bare cloth of my hands

we like to stumble

we inflict it on ourselves

the weight of the father

    trying to unravel the mother in me

    with my truant hands

where does a dream occur

in the curated wild

with a friend 

on brushed paths

the amphitheatre she saw by the river

I speak and my body releases

        a trapped bird caught in my hand

a stone mask does nothing but harm

we are living organism 

we are the earth breathing 

I pour myself onto flower beds,

my blood in the water

pink glow in a half sky

milk flowers on a red fissure 

soil, descriptionless miles

turbulence above a salt plain

I can’t see the ocean anymore