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(after Lorca’s Sonnets of Dark Love)
1.If I’m Your Lordship’s Dog
Jerk the leash and my neck jerks
yanking me back in line beside your ankle.
I wallow in scuffs:
the way collar-skin is chafed to a sore.
Belly on the carpet, I learn
the language of kicks. I come running.
I gag on the bone, suck toes,
lap whatever puddle you point at.
Pearls dribble down my chin.
Can I turn wolf now? Will I snap?
Hang-dog loves
his master’s ditch, that muddy hole.
2.These Waves Hitting Me
I’m learning to breathe underwater.
Miles over my head
the sky blurs a tipsy ceiling.
Rise to it. Kick off the seabed.
Open my eyes to wet, my tongue to salt.
It’s all very well
meeting a cloud of fish, another shipwreck.
My body sways its laziest samba,
a seahorse skimming through fingers.
Barnacles where skin was,
I might never come up for air.
3. In A Dusk of Nightingales
My wrists pulse their distance from you
whose blood is water, whose mouth ash.
I swallow your voice, its absence
a moonless colour.
One breath hooks the next.
Our difference, skin and its lack.
Your fingerprints:
petals on my eyelids.
Leave me dark where stars go
and nightingales sputter their song.
Robert Hamberger
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