In my bedroom, flowers

Heather MacLeod

covering your back, freckles in shapes
of Orion and Capricorn, moles smoldering
like suns hidden, I tried to find you.
Tried to make sense of all you did and said.
And I tried to understand each small mark,
every syllable and I used all my recollection.
Your skin was water beneath my hands;
the days when you were beautiful, days passed
away, placed between the thin pages of books
like flowers, pressed and two dimensional.

I have lost myself in constellations;
I’ve been looking for stars, have followed
you across several oceans and continents.
Now, you lie in my bedroom under the quilt
which covered my grandparents on their
wedding night, and I want to place my hands
across the freckles which cover your back, love
you in the hush, when my breath whispers
out your name in the long sigh, coming
after love spent, when affection is what we have left.

When you leave in the early morning, you pick
up my winter coat and kiss, you say, the smell
of me on its collar.  I remember you at the beginning
when I undressed in the meadow, my skin pale
in the twilight, the veins raised blue in my breasts;
you were the first to come into me, to feel me
cleave like water beneath you, and I heard you
crying out to God in the field, foxglove in your hair.
I felt translucent; I felt small enough to disappear
and the past ripples out, like pressed irises, behind me.

Heather MacLeod