The Weapon

for Isobel Dixon

Waving hello through the Fiat’s fumes, we were waving goodbye,
a film in amber fields of Cornish shade and wheat,
yellow jerseys and a crop duster — that Corsair —
hurling its shoulders over seven-year-old dream-white air.

You had yellow fever in some antic grey chassis, too, mid-
Pacific, gauntleted, hung at my mother’s lips, that hand-painted
lilac studio shot laying near your sack of home, now twenty years apart.
In the end you waved from the car to me, crying some way in to life,

and at your breakable neighbourhood return: ripped up, corseted,
the surgery over, the coming months became love’s parasite
and you became my upholstery of broken evenings, knowing summer static.
But I broke free with all my feelings ending empty in a weapon.

HMS Devonshire, there I see you scrapped in shaking loyal air,
you are breathing in a new Korean din, and I’m inside a future destitution:
breathing still foreshortens time. I’m almost your age now.
A mouthful lies between us then in some disgust of stories and a past,

I am dwarfed beside you in that summer field, a child in mewling montage.
How can we love what’s not bestowed, in the happiest
prize blood brings? My life has always been this weaker separation since.
Plied in that robbery of nows, as you piled in your pillows, too.