But sometimes, you are fire's radiance after a long night of heaving through winter snows. As you are the sunlit sea rocking over a coral reef and a diver floating in its sibilance. As you are a treadle stitching together the bombed out fragments of an onlooker's skin. As you are the hearth around which conversations happen over tea. At other times, you are also the absence that flares in autumn with its patterned avenues, in which I rove my tongue, over and over, like a fluttering leaf.

But it is when I cling to you, like a barnacle, I know you are the quicksilver of fish that embroiders these nights of dateless longing, Beloved, of whom I am, perhaps, not beloved.