It’s time again for the pouring
of thistledown into the palm
for the skidding of sycamore seeds.

Butterflies with red hair
settle on me like friends
and shadows lean and bend.

Our eyes mate casually.
No choosing is involved.
Instead you would walk

willingly up my path
climb the whiskery stairs
and talk in a small cocoon.

Meanwhile my task would be
to make a salad for example
and perhaps

to open my eyes without melodrama
leaving the window
open.

*

Rachel McAlpine

In your eyes
you keep a sunset
and a city.

You hear the frozen notes
of roses
in the air.

*

Rachel McAlpine

You were a late man in your small
thirties when I found you in
the incubator.

You had been abandoned in your
youth for too many
early necessary months.

For years you chose a deaf
judiciousness and a way
of frowning safely at your feet.

Now I instruct you, enunciating
blunt clear clauses: ‘You must
trust me. I promise not to vanish.’

Some day you will warily
raise your eyes, you will feel
your ears unclench, and you

will run into my feathers
like a chicken.

*

Rachel McAlpine

Safe, safe in the house.
Locked, locked
by the sun
to the couch.

I thought about freedom
the cold shout
the sharp blue and white
of your height.

I thought of another life
muffled and blurred with fluff
where pain is held in the mouth,
where backs are turned to the south.

Close for a time to your track
I found it bald and bleak.
But the sun shone white as chalk
and I thought my heart would crack.

*

Rachel McAlpine