SILENCES

Heat is personal. 

Marriage has taught us this. 

We both adjust 

the temperature on our 

individual mattress side. 

You open your book, a Flaubert novel, 

I, mine, a short story collection. 

Our pages tease each other;

an exchange we can’t read.

Silences are even more private than heat. 

This, we’ve known from years of staying 

together in marriage.

Our bodies surrender to the night,

its quilt simmering spent up,

oblivious flesh. In embrace, 

I feel your limbs move, feet twitch.

An excited choke escapes your throat.

Where are you though right next to me. 

Are you meandering through a 

Central Asian souk or could you be

chasing penguins in the arctic. Did 

you wander off with your favourite poet

from Pakistan, long dead, to argue 

that his evening of sorrow isn’t long, 

it’s interminable. 

I flounder in my search. 

You don’t remember your dream. 

We’re lovers who know each other 

inside out.

Yet this inscrutability. 

These insuperable shores of our dreams.

 

And yet.