lung
a harbour that remembers
Falmouth breathing salt into the seams of my forming.
Brian in sun-faded denim, laughing like driftwood
he taught me tides of change
how to read absence as presence
how low water reveals what history tries to keep.
Brian stands where the wind can reach him
breathing negotiated now, not assumed
his chest a dock taking smaller tides.
he speaks in routes, in drift, in what resists fixing
I hear the gaps between the words widening
like limpets loosening dropped into the boil.
I begin to collect what has not yet gone
his breath, the salt, the unfinished sentences
then bloodied coughs, and the metaphors breaking open.
the present unfurling under our feet
threads of his hippy years refusing to knot
but now they fray against something final.
I came from Warsaw where the past was sealed in concrete
statues watched and futures were rationed
where even cancerous silence had an official version.
and yet here, the shingle won’t keep its story in one shape
today already a ruin in soft rehearsal.
