Down on the beach you found a pyrite ammonite a perfect coil of gold that you held up to the sunlight and all the tourists gathered 'round a look of envy on each face they all wanted a piece of your Jurassic carapace. Oh, but you were unfazed, you prefer the misshapen things warped iron door knockers, fish spines and snooker balls, seized up wire mouse traps and disfigured belt buckles your pockets always brimming with all kinds of unname-ables, scuffed photos of people that you'll never meet, a bent silver cross, an assortment of cows teeth, chipped medicine bottles, tin boxes filled with rusty keys, a tattered cat-caught blue-tit wing propped up on your mantle-piece - After all, you say, Isn't it all remains. Your love for the living knows no restraint, and this debris is all evidence of it's flickering grace, you don't see how anyone could throw anything away. And I hold my breath and try not to explain what we both already know about our lives wearing away. For like this ancient coast, we're fated to erode. And mama, I don't believe anymore in a soul but if I'm wrong I'de like to think that one day when we're so old that swarming clay fills our skulls, someone will push back the earth from your bones, and find yours nestled there in your ribcage: a perfect coil of gold.

In the morning you were a drowsy fruit tree. I woke in your branches with lemur paws, eager to unpick your eyes like lychees and pluck your dreams like ants from your bark. But instead I make coffee and try not to notice how indifferent you are. Cause lately I've been spinning careful webs to keep safe these small testaments to the way the light falls on the angle of your hip. To the grazes on my shoulders made by your lip. But a sudden gust of wind bust open the window and tore them all to bits when you left. Late at night in the library I pour over diagrams of your breath. Looking for a pattern in those fathomless smudges that tell me nothing's changed. But I find only dust amongst bits of song, crumbs of pollen and tobacco stains. It occurs to me there is nothing more prolific than the distances between things. Distance between every page of every book in the building. Distance between the pillow case and your soft head. Distance between the palms of your hands and the skin on my wrists when you hold me down on the bed. Yeah, there is distance between us when we kiss.

Stranded as I was I stayed very still until I was not lost. And all that seemed vast and unfathomable became a tapestry of detail that I knew well. For every middle of nowhere there is the centre of everything, when you find that the only foundation you need are the soles of your own feet. Now an arc of woodsmoke marks your work. I watch it rise from where I sit in the afternoon. You find your peace in what must be endured and your skin is a time work proverb. Somewhere between sleep and it's other a gentle shift occurs. And the songs that I knew as a stranger are lost in the hum of the underworld. Your say since you stopped looking to the sky for answers and conversing with tireless ghosts there are so many little things that you have learned. And oh, Molina, your iron age beasts still patrol this grid sewn with mutant seed. They're still rattling those chains, the soil still soaked in the oil they bleed. Still heaving their mineral cargo around and taking their orders from self-appointed kings. Who assure us that their Gods are fierce and unforgiving, they conjure soap-flake blizzards and hold forked lightning between their teeth. Concerned only for the apparatus of their greed. And though I may be Godless, I am in love with little things. And I see nothing here worth punishing.

Here in these bitten rooms we wake to find our bodies are no longer our own. Whilst we slept our flesh became a rich soil where the insects built their homes. Our fingers bloat with poison and there are webs between our toes. The grasshoppers staked out your belly and the beetles claimed my arms when they make war it's polished black clashing with striped yellow armour thread-legged and spurred. It takes all day to clear our skin of their watch-towers and pull their flagpoles from our pores. I call my sister and I tell her that I am homesick and that the days just melt away from me. She promises that no time is ever wasted no matter how empty it seems. And I don't know if I agree but I'm tired enough to believe. She says, "well, what have you learned?". So I explain how each evening some unseen conductor raises a steady arm. And the troubled voices of the cicada chorus rise to a roar. And the moths resume their nightly chore fulfilling that old metaphor: Don't mistake your guide for what you're looking for. And my sister says, "well then, there you are". She is wise and always settles on a moral. So when you grant me a little love I will not try to crack its' shell. For anything that you might show me is not contained within you but in what you reveal. Now see that blood moon rise above the field.

After the party the carpet was strewn with the corpses of bright balloons. Like the aftermath of some aztec warfare, all shrunken in death they bleed our breath. And stood at the edge of the kitchen sink you were a lost explorer on the brink of a foaming abyss filled with cigarette ends and soapy dishes. And speaking softly in my ear you told how its so often you dream of planes that will carry you from here here where the bottles just breed with bottles 'til our words go soft in each others ears. You'd go someplace where the sea is a creased and greening hymn sung by an easy wind. You'd find God in a sharks egg spiral castles in the sky each cloud a pearly machine glowing egg-shell white. And at last belonging to no-one you'd be at last alive. After five years in a skin that you no longer recognise. It's just that everyone asks for so much. And can't they see that you're tired. But they just want to be close to you and so do I.

The summer was over when I got home we were so brave when the days were long. Now see the land draw up its thin silver cloak. The supermarkets like plastic jewels neatly sewn into the patchwork of suburbs and hedgerows. Oh how the lake lay, a heavy black tongue on the night that he left home. Down by the water where the boats tuned old sediment and bone to bright patina coats, you told me what he had done. I didn't understand, I was too young. But the bats plunged about us, loose snippets of darkness, and the night air cooled the lawns. And these events each seemed like artefacts of absolution, each an absolution of its own. On the pavement with the insects I played God. With my bucket of water I made cities rise and fall. Dusted their small brittle bodies with my side-walk chalk, watched them waver on the concretes brittle contours. And together we befriended the soil and discovered what cruelty was for. A stray swarm of lady-bugs told how this land was before us. Before our cowboy pylons lined the boulevards all braided steel and electric jaws. And the measureless exhale of these fossil fires dissolved the grass-chant, wing-beat and cricket choirs. But I could have sworn I heard their voices in the soil beneath the low thunder of the road. And with my laughter rattling like a skeleton in my arms, I carry their courage home.

Possum stares us down moon-eyed. There is space enough for each event to be it's own signifier. Wait long enough. something always emerges whole. Ants cluster around a dead grasshopper like scavengers stripping the valuable metals from a broken down factory. Bright yellow pollen in a dirty cobweb catches a glimpse of itself, reflected in a memory of jellybeans spilled on a dusty road (some other time, somewhere far away). Wild packs of family dogs patrol the grid. and the dust in the floorboards and the grass spits crickets. heaps of bricks. The deep howl of freight trains, those wise old guards. blueberry pancakes. An ancient tractor, it's gearbox like an old fashioned puzzle. cicadas, coyotes, flies, an orgy of insects. moths litter the lamps. their small purple hearts a pulp locked in a dusty bulb. Shrieking and then in the morning clumps of raccoon fur in the grass. oatmeal for breakfast. The printing press, it's cast iron muscles ever waiting for the word, a cool thought drawn up in sticky black ink, anything to flex. rat in the basement. bat in the barn. swollen ankles. Worms (6 miles). an overgrown toy rocket ship. a milkweed seed pod on the window-ledge, it's belly bursting with it's wind borne babies. I am taking apart old habits, in this air they are brittle and break away effortlessly in my hands. wrecked cars heave with spiders. tiny red birds in the walls. tracks. the field washed gold after a summer of so much panic in the grass. Possum, bloodied and resigned, heaves a breath, bares its gums, peeks through it's disguise, it's fake death. We go out to the abandoned ammunition storage facility. there are miles of bunkers. A dead dog surrounded by packets of insecticide. A small black snake watches us change the flat tire. (the horizon is fire.) Driving back we are mostly quiet. it is simple silence. owl feathers on the dashboard. No sign of the usual devices. The habitual apparatus of "do you love me or not do you do you do you". These are obsolete manuals for storm navigation. If there is hurt it is just hurt. If there is contentment it is just contentment. there is friendship there is friendship. Forget weltshmerz and forget belly lizards. dogger, finisterre. it means nothing here. I made a new compass and placed a joy at it's magnetic center. To sleep close together. To be grateful. To be boiling. bitten. filthy. freezing. Our struggle is shared with everything else on the land. And there is an absolution in that. full moon/ blood moon/ moon streaked and waterlogged/ moon: a hysterical white bird on a black lake/ moon: a hot loaf of bread/ moon: a watermelon hacked to pieces with his grandfathers axe, its saskatoun wood handle engraved with his name/ popcorn moon/ moon: a severed finger, spills a glut of skyblood on the ploughed mud/ moonrise in the empire of small scrambling beasts/ moon, I am learning new ways to love old things. What will become of these rooms when we are not there to kick up the dust. will they ache for us the way I ache with love. I can't tell. but in spring. a pulse. in spring. a swell. the tick of new calamus on crushed eggshell. The well, the well, the well, the well.