Blue necklace left/ On a charred chair/ Tells that Beauty/ Was startled there. - Alun Lewis

In post, a box of books arrive.

Is this what happens when the weather in the inconstant heart shifts? Like weeds that must be purged, does one take down the books given by a lover (about whom the heart is certain no longer - was he the beloved or a passing hope?), and send them back with no note?

Handwriting in blurred blue on the label is all she has left to remember of his hands by - those which quickened her charred beauty once.

A friend saw the rooms Of Keats and Shelley At the lake, and saw ‘they were just Boys’ rooms’ and was moved By that. And indeed a poet’s room Is a boy’s room And I suppose that women know it. Perhaps the unbeautiful banker Is exciting to a woman, a man Not a boy gasping For breath over a girl’s body.

Some mornings, not all,

as fog hovers over the ice floed river,

a vee of ducks suddenly rounds

that far bend, swings upriver,

and then as suddenly vanishes like a filament of blue smoke.

Love, memories of you veer in like so much like this: so suddenly, and so gaspingly sharp.

Feb 6th 2008, Arkansas River