About Gravity by Deborah Swain
(woodblock
by Lucienne Dorrance)
THESE
RED SHEETS
These
red sheets
have swallowed
me
in folds
the colour of peonies.
They make
this page seem
less white,
like
the creamy
top of the milk.
Your purple
scarf, left
uneasy,
gaudy on the bed,
still
warm and
steeped
in your skin-
scent
sweetness,
pulls
me away from
these
blackly biro-ed words
on fine
and pearly-grey lines,
(such
delicately imposed discipline)
to press
my face into
its surprising
tickles,
breathe
you in and
make whole
your absence.
RELIC
If I’d
known
you weren’t
coming back
I’d
have waited
before
washing
our last
sheets and
kept them
instead
in folds
of tissue paper,
the invisible
body print
essence
of you preserved
in myriad
molecules
of skin
and hair and sweat.
X-rays
and carbon dating
would
prove that you’d existed.
But now,
only I can
trace
the outline
of where
you lay.
And then,
only
because
I remember.