The Summer I Spent Under Your Star

Icy water burns

The fleshy space between my toes

I gaze at your face

Up, and beneath a wooded smile

I bathe my body in the ebb and flow of sun

Your son, taller and younger

Than both of us

We love him            

And mysteriously

He loves me

He is a child of the water, running naked into pools and

Climbing over green carpets that

Throw the rest of us unwilling into tadpoles and rock

To you, his devotion, unwaning

Strains under a love

That crumbled the day you lost your hair

He cannot look at you

And I instead gaze through your eyes and see some

Pure crystal of a thing which is

The hardened jelly of your being

Your spirit

And I love you for it

I understand you, and I fear that I will become you

The day you stopped thinking

He phoned me and said

'I think you should know that my mother

I know, I croaked,

I

No pain, I

Really valued the time I spent with her

I don't know what you did

But she wanted to thank

I regret your loss, I immediately regret

Those clumsy sounds, thick and heavy

The dry click of the phone

A black expanse of his silence

The burning of a star now gone,

I still see it through clouds

A faint orb, the

Huge round moon of my selfish head

My tears

Which were not meant for her

Were not mine to cry

I am a surplus vessel for his sorrow

And a vessel for the blood which, from woman

Flows to woman

My blood spotted on cotton

The only summer I spent with you.