***
Your winding sentences fly through my ears,
Unending stream of stars – the tapestry of vowels,
My eyes are asked to sing the pauses of your mouth
My hand is moved to catch the gusts of south
Boreo.
My force of thought blows candles out,
I’m quiet, in the dark – I sculpt the flower towers –
Calendula, melissa, coriander –
The botanist in me begins to sprout.
You had been etching herbs into my desert soul,
The scents are pressed between the pages of my dusty tome
- A dictionary – book of feelings and their meanings,
- Forgotten knowledge –
Sometimes I think of all the places
In which we slept — in the peripheries
Around the world,
On beaches that allow to swim with dogs,
In half-abandoned sanatoria –
Once chic imperial resorts
For urbane sufferers,
Inside the walls that cough and shake with past pneumonias,
Chambers in the high Alps that freeze
The fear and turn it into dreams,
In quiet of the dark – the eyes are asked to memorise
The waters and the oils prescribed to cure
Human stories and Time.
