Your Euphrates

Where water slurs around the edge of a delta’s mouth—
and celes­tial North is not ‘some­thing else’ but a con­tin­u­a­tion
of the river: calf, thigh, spoon­ing the shore­line like a boul­der
has the soft­est skin in the world—you will ques­tion yourself.

Think back to a time when every­thing we touched could turn
us into a palace—like Midas, only it was you who became
the glis­ten­ing walls for a world of sub­jects to mean­der, maybe
admire, maybe lose them­selves in the ambrosial architecture

Of your body. A time meta­mor­pho­sis was the direct response
to a warm wrist, a curi­ous glance, the first hint of human
suffering—and how some­where down the gold-coloured line
that bounds, unin­hib­ited, from ‘this mys­ti­cal gar­den’ to ‘that

Dark crea­ture, lurk­ing in the cor­ner, and back to you: a stun­ning
lightshow—mythology lost its mean­ing. Admi­ra­tion became
demean­ing. A col­lec­tion of mason jars filled with the Mis­souri
means: I don’t want to lose you, but still I can’t trust you

To stay. Inside me, where a body of water, & sky, is dis­jointed:
you are a boul­der I can’t encom­pass. If we believed in myths,
and I were a palace, you’d walk through me—maybe burn
your place in the celes­tial array of invaders, & leavers,

and I’d go to the river, a streak of suf­fer­ing
light—and empty the jars at the knees
of an unbro­ken world.