Girls from the language schools go chittering
in birdlike tongues, thin-breasted, doe-eyed,
Spanish or Italian, full of hormones, angst, vocabulary.

You caught me eyeing a Swede with bee-stung lips,
Botticelli face in a virgin’s halo of blonde.
Her breasts spelled desire through her cotton shirt.

A summer ago we stood unhappy, ill through our bones,
not able to speak in the hail of argument
and never sure, after, if our non-arguments survived.

Is aphasia the rain shower against speech,
or loss of memory of speech, the unspoken
burning in half-life longer than what surfaces?

I’m grateful for what you have chosen to ignore.
This summer, hand in hand, we discover again
cowpath walks worming our medieval city, home

further than ever and myriad ways not to return.
In the market we buy tidal samphire, Shakespeare’s
drenched veget ...

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