Sestina No. 1

 
Eating sourdough toast, half spread
with yeast extract, half pumpkin seed butter,
                                    we hover
             on tall wooden stools
         (knees not quite touching)
an inch or so above your kitchen floor.
 
It’s a wet August morning. Backlit fluor-
escent rain soaks next-door’s lawn, newly-spread
over tumbled clods, but it’s not touching
(not yet) that deeper thirst. I'd better
go, I think, as Portishead's 'Pedestal'
oozes from the radio. I hover.
 
The rain stops. In the distance, gulls hover;
ancient creatures move across the seafloor;
wobbly feet in rolled-up jeans share rock pools
with spiny urchins and starfish— limbs spread
out under a sun the colour of full-fat butter;
lovers’ hands form steeples, fingertips touching.
 
Who’d have thought that last week, touching
down in São Paulo, I’d see humming birds hover
and squabble over Honeysuckle buds, drink butter-
milk from a cowboy’s palm, ride out a flaw-
less gallop – the stillness at its centre spread
like sunrise through my chest. Oh! but it’s too
 
long since I’ve felt so much myself. A heart’s tool-
kit needs only love shaped in the touching
of another heart, I muse, as the sun spreads
light across the counter-top and you hover
in the doorway of a new thought. The floor
rising a fraction surprises me, but
 
earlier, eating toast and pumpkin seed butter,
                 perched on these tall wooden stools,
                        I do recall a feeling that the floor
                                           was not quite touching
                   where it should. Somewhere, high over
                                 the South Downs, the outspread
 
wings of a lone Kestrel, touching
nothing but air, throw shadows across a valley floor
spread with buttercups and deep red toadstools.

Published in Obsessed with Pipework

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