we're in this house,
and the rain and the car sounds
and every day hollowed out by

snowdrops, finally, I thought
sad when the woods grow dark
I thought they would never

and in this house we drift
and there's bath time and silent
my son watches the spiralling water

and he smiles and his eyes are
so bright and I forget to disconnect
and I forget that I hate endings

and we're together in time,
just in time for the last spiral
and we watch the water disappear

every day hollowed out by
what we do and do not see, by
what is both there and not there

by that 
spiralling 
moment of love

    woke up with hangover, sick and cold
    caught sight of myself everywhere
    in billowing light, water-clear;

    movement to and from became
    the growing and shrinking of things,
    the silence of their disappearance;

    sky built into an upside-down city,
    birds in fluid flocks curving
    out over the waste ground,

    sunlight like blood in our skin
    thickening our happiness until we bend
    under it, like snowdrops under their petals.

    Sat in a park to stay calm -
    hidden in a maze of drainpipes
    and alleys and fire escapes

    a place with a path of gravestones
    children ‘asleep in Jesus’ - maybe wake
    to the impatient tap of fingertips

    on the coffin lid - “You’re missing it all” -
    to see angels falling like meteors, like pips
    from an apple held over the ocean -

    this is the ‘other’ world - an hour
    became a century in my sickness
    and happiness - machinery for flowers -