‘You are a hole into which’

In winter, the ground is full of cracks. Warmth is just vibrations, and nothing moves here but the chatter of my teeth. I can’t help it. You must be somewhere here, hibernating in a place the cold won’t let me see. I’m frozen solid, people used to say, and it’s only solids that can crack.

We get smaller when we’re cold, and when we’re cold like this, we fall out of our clothes; we turn to pieces, fragments, dust, and dust blows away, dust blows into, dust settles. There are holes for it to fill. It grows, we grow, from the meadow furrows up to the sky, from the cracks to the uncracked, from the crumbling intestines of mole holes to the soft virgin tissue of the clouds.

I hold up a huge robe, freshly washed. You’ll grow into it, I say, and it falls to the floor, and in a second it’s Spring, and you’re the size of a tree, and you’re wearing it, and you’re everything in my eyes because for longer than I can tell I see nothing else. Goodnight, I say ten thousand times, or perhaps it’s only once.

From a hole, you say? From space? All this, from nothing? The soil not there, the warmth not there, the light not there. In absence we are an entirety. Into which goes, out of which comes. But tonight, it’s getting colder still, and I’ve forgotten what comes next.

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