all I’ve really sought is a pocket of warmth, life
can be that I think, despite experience, but the product
of desire hinges upon a capacity to abandon
obligation in favour of a duty to joy
or at least to the capacity to swim in a sea
of azure voices, crickets in the dark say
or the small stirring of night birds, plunk of water
falling from a low height
resulting in that slow unclench, chest wall lifts
dark air lung infill, once concretized in trauma
remedied by the solicitude of warm
skin damp from water undulating under starlight
healing reaches the limit of hope, that’s when
a life takes off, when meaning comes back, its hand
outstretched to meet yours, curled edge to its smile
less a blade and more the promise
of a mojito along some fairy-lit canal
but it’s the silent passage of hunters you know
there, but never quite breach the yellow light
or expectation, mind’s favourite perfume, top note
usually an owl intermittently calling, small cold thread
sound of thin wind coming down mountainside
or stirring the water close in, as if some creature
were hunting the shallows
just want to hang, loosely rolled in a mosquito net
or hole up, the same way a badger does
when it gets too cold at night, or when its babies
are due, or maybe, sitting by myself at some small
wooden taverna at the edge of a busy quay
smell of fish and coffee, long tail of baguette and oranges
jam smeared on a knife, half-filled crossword
and time to be silent, be here, where ever that is
without moving in pain, or coma induced by
belaboured memory, instead, abed with mosquito net
tucked, safety of temporary harbour, or an acknowledged
seat at the table, either way, invisible to the biting kind, you become
expected to life’s wildlife, that sensation of lungs that finally take
a full breath, what I suppose is the body’s knowledge of hope
Pearl Button lives in the Salishan Territories of western North America. She is published or forthcoming in a variety of journals including The Literary Cauldron, Posit, SurVision Magazine, Skink Beat Review, Impspired and Peculiar Mormyrid.
