Likestarlings

Becoming cacti

When the phone rang I couldn’t answer. I was the size
of a matchbook and getting smaller. Oh baby, because of you
I became a gleam on the kitchen sink, the silence of tins
in a cupboard. I became cloudbanks of dirt on the windows
I wander through my house looking out of. I became so small
I couldn’t speak; I wanted to just be: be opaque in parts
and in other parts let the sun through, like a variegated leaf,
I wanted to pour you in and out of me till we were rocks
and a waterfall, till you were bark and I was the trunk of a tree.
It’s hard to do this. I am all pieces of a house and you’re
a voice in my ear with a body and many things to do. I can only
show you how I feel with this slight tremor, with a trick of the light;
by angling my mirror to the sun and burning something.
The way I feel is like the look in the eyes of any kind of animal,
a duck huddled down in the grass, or a cat I met on a wall –
that tiny glimmer always breaks my heart, as if it could be
someone signalling for help. When you call again I’ll answer.
I’ll be straightforward. My promise is how hard I’ll work
to learn to be at peace. And by then we’ll be as calm as soil adrift
in a saucer, or the roots of an urban hedge; we’ll be the cactus
on your windowsill, that lived all these months without water.