"Borderchild"

           i.

     Too big for the body the cradle of his arms, boy’s head
     limp on his breast, light as a shell is light, occupant
     levered from roundels and whorls bereft of substance.
     A sodden red shirt, child nestled on the sand like a snail.
     The bruised dampness of his cheek. That tall man
     lifting the child. Does he carry him as a son or a thing
     that must be moved. He thinks of him still. Wakes
     with a weight in his arms, the smell of sea
     clogging his throat, bedsheets cuffing his ankles.
     His sleeping children, limbs loose in the heat, he
     can’t stop checking. The lungs’ brave pockets fighting
     even that liquid Goliath flooding the bronchial tree.
     The clammy cold in his chest that won’t. The boy’s
     moulder filling. He bends, he is bending
     always his arms doing what is natural, picking
     up this soft wet child.

           ii.

     Convex bowl of snow-bellied cloud, crow-
     punctured, wolf-punctured, sour milk of dawn.
     Rolling flatline everywhere at once. The faint stick
     as the eyelashes freeze. Lifting the child from the snow
     waist high, doll falling into footprints, its unblinking
     silence. Her cry. He counts the steps, each one
     crumbling, counts himself into numbness. Into must.
     Into forward, the blind animal of it seizing his limbs,
     the rise and fall, hold and clutch, all this so far
     from the heart’s febrile furnace. The child heavy
     in his arms, he could tuck her into the cold
     warmth folding around his knees, that open
     unharried light, its veil slipped across
     their wet unseeing. Still, her shudder
     winging deep its red breath down his spine.

          iii.

     Shore-slope into sea, desert heaving mountain,
     the steel serpent’s ridged back slicing parched
     verdance. A tight cross-hatch of metal woven
     string-game into grids pressed against the girl’s
     body stamped into centimetre segments. Her
     whole shape ghosting the grey rods trying
     to cross her out. The floral fabric of her dress,
     her brown arms, dark eye caverning. Desert
     fans behind her, etched with footfall, memory
     spirited by sunlight. Miles juddering against
     her skin like barrels of water. The blank deer
     of longing hides in her iris, fragile
     and fleeting.

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