School. In sneakers and pop-socks, I go there. I gloss my duskened lips with sunrise. The dull chalkboard sky. I raise my hand, fill it with the vowels that have befallen my hand. The boys, blushing. The kink of their riverine whispers. My pink moon knees, plenilune■ #VSS365

The river was stuttering out of town. Taking sips out of our time. Don't you ever look between the letters upon the page of a book and see the light of the sky. I agreed with that. As if the leaves of a tree. A marvel, she said, catching tears in the valley of her hand■ #VSS365

Upstairs. She fills the suitcase. For-ever, she said. As you press the ivories of the Steinway, a thrush vocalises the sustained keening of the river that leaves this town. Her footfall. Tearing at the roots of what once was. The moon. A floodlit palm across your face■ #VSS365

You picked me up. In your mouth. The way a herring gull does a cockle. You rose into the sky. Opened your big mouth. Dropped me to the hard ground. To break me. To reveal the inside of my mind. To swallow me. To pass me through your body. To watch me fall one more time■ #VSS365

I stare at the bedsheets. Last time, first positions. The folds, stunning in their stillness, held like the wake of ducklings behind their mother. We used to reset them each morning. I leave the crests and valleys just as they fell. Your side remains an undisturbed shore■#VSS365

We are in the last memory of our first dance. The nightsky falls. A pocket full of sixpence. Eventually, we fall, too. Time goes around the back of the grandfather clock. When it is ready, it turns back. The roly-poly moon makes its appraisal. When I awaken, you are gone■#VSS365

The sun is sketching shadows. The laneway opens to the bonnet of the sea. We lay. Cheek to blanket, I look at her. The rise of her breasts against the sky are like the hills beyond. If I could, I'd set the sun into a ring of white gold, put it on her finger in appraisal■ #VSS365

The demon Sun was up, staring into the looking glass of the sea, fixing its mad crop of hair. Time crept around the bend. The last light of the day slipped away. The velvety nightsky came down like the curtain of a theatre. To appraise him, Moon turned on her task light■ #VSS365

Furiously, she shouts, furious, winter in her eye. We are as done as yesterday. The rootball is beyond repair. You have pruned the life out of me. She goes on. Raises the suitcase into the pallid air. Inside the music box in my chest, apprehension lifts its lid and sings■#VSS365

I let her in. Her florid cheeks, blooming from the cold rain. We don't speak. There is a hard, brief light through the blinds. We move against the wall, dry-mouthed, hitting the wood. It is heavy and unbeautiful, a final, sharp weight pulling us both down into the dark■ #VSS365

She says, We'll split everything. Right down the middle like an apple. Then, like a hound, she hurries out the door with the wrong suitcase. All of a sudden, she is at the door banging for the right suitcase. And I look at my things strewn across the street like carrion■ #VSS365

She said she would come home with him. He said that his bed was dry as a riverbed. That together they could make a river. She liked how he said things. They started with their mouths. After, she said love is a grain, then a mountain. She wanted to know how far rain fell■#VSS365

The brightness yielded. A birth grain lodged in the whorl of his thumb. He loosened it and it drifted. A room returned, his mother’s body holding him again, the place before first breath and separation, before he knew his own name. The moon held him. He was inside it■ #vss365

The moon answered by folding its light inward. What had been surface became depth, and depth became step. He placed his foot upon a brightness that did not resist him. The sea pulled below, but less than before. Cheek to cheek with the moon, nothing remained between them■#VSS365

The stars no longer held their places. One crossed the other. Something scaled and silver brushed against his hand. The moon lurched. When he looked up, the distance between him and it had changed. His father’s cry struck the moon like a pistol shot. The ladder twisted■ #VSS365

A star struck past his face, cold and wet. Others defenestrated the space between him and the moon. The moon held its canticle without change. Below him, something vast turned. The air tightened. He rose through the turning darkness. To fall now would be to fall like rain.#VSS365

Midsummer thickened the air. The moon gave its canticle into the darkness. Above him, the leviathan sky, vast, near. Below, the water shifted; something answered in its deep abyss. The batch of stars gathered around him like fish.He climbed, and the moon reached for him■ #VSS365

The moon hung above him, full and bright. The satchel held the urn. His father held the ladder, hands exact on the rungs, not looking up. The soft putter of water against the hull, as if the sky were breathing. Halfway, the moon tilted toward him. He did not look down■ #VSS365

Weeks later, the father rowed the boy beyond the last buoy. He rowed as though distance could be undone. A ladder lay across the thwarts. He set it upright beneath the moon and held it steady. The boy climbed. From below came the call of whales. The sea fit in his hand■ #VSS365

He wrote that he would clinch her hand at the station. The letter came back with clinch struck through. In red pen, she wrote, CLENCH. “Make it gripping,” He did not reply. At the station he took her hand the way he said he would. She did not mention the letter again■ #VSS365