Can only the dead write of death?
I wax pathetic and weaken.
I may see a bird fly across the pink,
and discover its footprints on my bronze eye.
So is he a lamp that I turn on,
or a kiss on my neck?

This evening, this leavening;
else I fix a fringe of him
to my lack and kill an endless sight
spawned by right. Thanks, to visit him
and the innate doorstep, his breath.

My design to spark out of reflex
my action, and shed it – there
it sits in a dropped box of me,
his remark. I remember… anywhere,
the recesses, the monstrance of worry.

I pour down from the shrug
of his shoulders. The remaining world
out there, folded in the beginning
and twitching still – I stare it,
so weak it can be blotted
in our murmur together.

The round frost of silence, then,
limber in its kind-of-light; it sprinkles
on my rubbed face, my strewn pace.
I say the rocking day
is where I am loath to crouch.

And he a touch of the possible
drenched. The feathery twinings
of his slow faults flapping me
– I petrify the will, “arc
of the neck I cannot catch”.

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T.A.R. Wallace (he/his) is a yoga therapist and table tennis coach living on Dja Dja Wurrung country, Australia. His poems have been published in The Brussels Review, Conduit, Big Score Lit, The Poetry Lighthouse, Meanjin, Heat, Australian Poetry Journal, and others. He won the Lane Cove Literary Awards Poetry Prize 2023.