How It Ends

     
If I have always loved airports,
for their meetings and their pains, for their
bitter-sweet passings 
of human tenderness;
now I loved them, like the first butterflies
of Spring; 
life 
grew up,
all around me; smiles spread like 
waves over sand,
hands reached, and skin touched skin like it hurt;
some cried,
some gasped,
all ran about spaces between them.

I,
held your longed-for face in my palms,
and kissed you, 
like the stars were falling,
like war was beginning,
like the world
was ending...
And it was spinning, spinning; the 
arrivals hall,
my feet on no solid ground,
summer dress, pressed, tight against your chest,
coconut scent 
beneath neon strip-lights;

and the world saw,
and shyly turned their smiling heads 
in bashful voyeurism 

...and for once, you didn't,
and we didn't care.
    

Safe

    
I told you I thought sometimes,
perhaps you said words,
that only kept you safe? Ones you knew
I'd put away,
and cherish,
somewhere by my heart? Not the other-truth
I'd pick apart and offer to the
sky-gods, in your name?
Words that kept me believing,
the same, stone reasons,
of precious,
and grace?
I came to know your abashed
face: the one splashed across
with crimson innocence;
a cyclical dance - the one
that began
the whole thing;
    
let me put dead swallows
back
in their nests, and ghostly,
they will sing
of how they fell;
us as well; or you, or I,
sometime tellers
and believers of knights'
tales;
an unskilled spy
and the happiest girl in the world.
I only had to meet your
eyes,
and it was all an adventure,
all cherry pies and aeroplanes,
twinkling lights
and flayed-open veins;
raw, and honest;
and how could
I ever doubt it?
from the soul; what was?
what is,
without it?
   

Europa

     
You can take a piece
of my heart out
and bury it, in the African market
beneath the Eiffel Tower,
that had me,
at twelve years old,
tell the bells of Sacre Coeur
they toll for my stories
of summers
among wilderness ruins and stones and
silence me,
make me alone, with the sounds
of sea sloshing against
harbour walls,
minute fish in swathing shoals,
and the hiss of tanks carrying the calls
of strange birds
in olive trees,
the scent of dew-kissed hills,
wet sand,
whirring pedals on a midnight's breeze,
...my love,
and the moon
on a stick...
make me weak
at my knees and
ecstasy-sick with paella, gelato, and crepes,
soft glasses of sun-blessed
grapes under
barrel-vaulted & woven-vine bars,
foot-prints through my soul made under
endless, diamond stars, that weep
from a depth
of blue-black,
rushing kilometres of click-clack, the screech
of wheels-down on hot tarmac and
the hugs of 'coming home' -
not ground and borders,
but eyes and arms,
- mine, mine...whole, calm...
Go ahead. Take a piece of my heart,
bury it, when the snow falls
and the Glühwein flows,
...with eirini on my shoulders, it alone,
chooses the hand it holds...
and I need no permission
to love.
    

Cloud-Gazing

   
Lie down. Lie still. We will cloud-gaze;
so bright is the buttermilk moon - 
she lights up hearts and vague dragonflies 
and feeds you glitter 
from a silver
spoon of memory;
rocks washed smooth
by a wave that calls your soul;
come back
come back, to castles,
and empty, sand-filled
holes of swirling, foaming sea,
reflecting light of stars...
from galaxies away, they know
and imprint 
your heart on me,
and mine on you - we two,
from shadows hew,
at midnight, on the beach,
cloud-gazing;
caressed, by a yellow
half-moon.