The hours will not freeze. This morning
you leave, cross the road and are gone.
Another hour passes, six more minutes.
Then there is the wine from last night
and the long day starting now. It all starts
now. It starts with this glass of wine I pour
at eleven or was it ten; your smell on my mouth
on my hands all of me I do not wash for days

but sit and drink myself back into the inescapable.
You are in a bath somewhere I believe,
somewhere I understand, somewhere
in a bath I believe I can imagine and
understand, deep and warm. Somewhere
in this washed, colour-fast suburb, this
impenetrable, unendingly quiet collection
of snapshots and romance novels and dreams

of another country. Somewhere for a moment
you are in that bath I imagine like a god.
But you are in a bath unknown to any god,
or me, or to the late, lone jogger in red shorts
who crosses and crosses the span of my window.
And now the day slows. Perhaps your cold tap drips.
Maybe you lift your leg and place your right toe
at its mouth to feel its chill. Maybe in the ache

of a muscle your body occupies itself
with memory; maybe it remembers mine.
Or now your mouth is dry with cinnamon
in a sudden addiction to spiced coffee.
And it remembers mine. I don’t know. I sit here
and drink and all over again I cook
you a meal at midnight, open a second bottle
and lie next to you as if I were a woman;

or I am a moth perhaps; or a river-long
swathe of palmiet; or the soft lick
of water against the edges of a rock pool
where the rare leopard drinks;
or the pied crow that with three flaps
lifts, wheels, and flies off as if it was me
finding finally the inescapable. Or was it
the oak leaf that wakes to frost;

the buzzing filament of a word;
the suburb at rest after some resurrection
that cannot know the infinite;
a Spanish lament from a sunlit nave,
the singer’s red dress a pennant
waving against dark stone, blue sky?
All these and also the unaccountable as
for one night the existence of everything

troubled no one and nothing, not you, not me;
not the meniscus of wine. Here, now,
in this sun-blessed room
where some re-ordering begins
the cosmos closing in around the space
where you stood or sat or lay
and air filling the emptying bottle,
I sit here, drink, do not know

and stare until at dusk
two Egyptian geese cross my window,
heading home. And my neighbours like me
grow drunk and make known to all
their private quarrel, looking not for any
infinite but that of alcohol. He bays
at her, she at him. They take it and take it.
I sit here as it starts. It all starts here. Now,

as I grow drunk on something else