Poetry | Elegy for the Living by Kathryn Simmonds

Elegy for the Living

We wash up side by side

to find each other

in the speakable world,

and, lulled into sense,

inhabit our landscape;

the curve

of that chair draped

with your shirt;

my glass of water

seeded overnight with air.

After this bed

there’ll be another,

so we’ll roll

and keep rolling

until one of us

will roll alone and try to roll

the other back — a trick

no one’s yet pulled off —

and it’ll be

as if I dreamed you, dear,

as if I dreamed this bed,

our touching limbs,

this room, the tree outside alive

with new wet light.

Not now. Not yet.

This poem was published in The Visitations (Seren, 2013). Source: Poetry (October 2014) Poetry Magazine