When the real differences show up
we both happen to be in the glare of
each other’s whiteness — she had washed
the clothes in the morning & by evening
we were done. I thought about this a lot —
who is Moses and who is God? Symmetry
cleaved us together, then apart.
How do you ground two lunatics in love
with ideals when the axe is suspended
from the beginning, relationship over
before its begun? No-thing matures until
you can’t avoid it anymore. We had loved
our symmetry until its shadows dawned.
‘We’ve just bought a house,’ she said.
‘But we haven’t had kids,’ words that didn’t
pass my lips, then four cardboard boxes
in the backseat of a Cortina. I shook a fist
at Uranus, the lightning god.
She hears her windchimes playing different
songs — she will tell in another six months.

COPYRIGHT Simon Heathcote

We are a house of small things,
my genius in a jam jar by the sink.
Each day at noon I sit
at my keys and dream of cloisters
and floral courtyards
among the dead, or see myself
as a young Mozart, feet dangled
like two carrots, hoping for a bite,
a crunch to remind me I’m living…

Her foot is caught in the snare of old Ireland
& you know that she is soon the stuff of
legend & the ground will love her too
much to let her leave, the rough tides always
clawing at her door, her story integral to his.
Some might say she was doomed soon
as…

We thought of the river and decided
to visit —
the lone guitarist pumping out
Bach, the dogs sitting patiently as their
owners talked, the cyclists who nearly
squished us on the path
and all those paintings

beside themselves with envy, saying
‘Look!’
I have no words, quiet
like a hermit in…

‘You know why your culture is sick? It is sick because it worships the rebel and not the lover and servant. It is sick because it worships the man of reason and not the naked and dancing slave of God. It is sick because it has lost the image of…