When you’re not here there’s rain
         sifting onto slates, the porch light’s
bleb of molten resin spun around its
         filament; midges dying with lit wings,
house martins leaving for the shimmy
         of Saharan air; a novel laid under a table
lamp – all fiction and our lives conflated
         there – and rain falling, its fabulations
filling each dimension, expanding a lost
         summer’s legendary wetness: the river
simmering, net furled on the tennis
         court where I watched a white owl
blunder into trees to break its
         vow of loneliness. Even before this,
there was some urgent thing you said
         I didn’t hear, lugging your bags to the
car, half-turning when you turned
         to leave, pouting like a starlet, fluffing
first gear. I swept you away like dust
         from my sleeve, impatient with every
thing that might lay waste to precious
         thoughts alone; now long days dusk to
ghostly nights, wraiths of future life.
         You’re gone as if our sleepy pupal
past has died, dissolving to hatch
         me: goldwing imaginal circling argon
in hot glass, spirals of tungsten, atoms
         that endlessly collide.