But it hurts to uproot you, sessile, tenacious,
cleaving to lintel, to cornice, festooned
by a presence so subtle, it’s another order,
the nebulous level,
not symbiosis but indifference
to others’ business, dross of discarded
ideas collecting round fingers
like weed that trails thick in rivers,
alien, productive,
ceiling the underside of a meniscus
I can only just glimpse. Once taut and exact,
gauged by your maker’s own scale, her body
as rule – now softened, so formless your author’s
irrelevant: only a grey dream of grip, of purchase
that hangs here in tatters, holdfast ephemera.
Ravelling hands like cling-film, like floss, as if careless
of choice, as if to conflate, to collapse this flesh
with any blind surface, opportunist, true to me as
ectoplasm to mystic, your bufferin
a cell’s padding, the satin ruchin
in a coffin, no more cleaning, no routine, I want
to be alone and let you flower again.