All love, all life is a reconfiguring of all that’s already been reconfigured. Watch old trees scattering leaves on a forest floor like older trees, before being sawn to a fresh existence as paper or logs, that you will use to rebuild a place you think you’ve felt before.
And rubbing up beneath each sketch you create of you, walking, shoulders slumped into the days that are to come, is the advice that doctors once scribbled in italicised, copper-plate handwriting, advising in a drooling baritone -that you can hear can even through the ink of words – to seek sea or mountain air – to get back to when
he loved you as if days were numberless—
melding together— drawing your mouth down
to his skin, the walls around you dreamless
holding pale snowflake after snowflake from
the drift and splay of limbs, the bare forest
becoming a story wending your sighs
shielding then exposing you to the rest
of the rushing world’s sickening delight
in naming you survivor or victim
interchanging blame with masked forgiveness
divorcing love from warm lips still swollen
with kisses, tarring you in rumour’s mesh
confusion pulsing beneath all you said
as you fall hard— smitten again —to bed —
all of this muttering over and over— flicking like the steely blades of scissors in a lethal cabaret snipping part of your brain away to indulge in the confetti of remembering winter branches, impossibly jewelled in emerald leaves— suspending all calendar tallies of lived and lost days—
quieting the world and shutting the door of a small cabin against the snow.
Jenny is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. Her poetry is published in several printed anthologies, magazines and online poetry sites. Jenny lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats. You can read more of her poems at her website.
You can find more of Jenny’s work here on Ink Pantry.