Away from the hands that hold,
I exist for the first time
amidst the roar moon shells
emptied of their soft and fleshy lives,
hard and white under the soft waves.
Planting my secrets in the cold red sand
before the morning milking,
and the farmer’s wife commending us
for our breakfast promptness
meant we had never slept,
and were hungry for more
than our bodies could feed us
in those young years,
never doubting that fear
would always be a part of excitement,
when don’t worry in the hay loft
led to more than straw up our backsides,
and for the first and last time
I tell my mother I am in love, she who knows
nothing I think of love, its worldly smile
that carves itself on every tree—
I love Alan Madley madly, madly,
its immortality that fades,
when the slap of a beaver tail on the water
shoots me home like a bullet
to the ties that bind.
I must have thought, roaming the beach
collecting summer moons,
that love would never end.