Bokelskere.no

When We Met

It was October
I remember because that is the month
that goes into digits
and the birches start shedding their leaves
and the slender prongs of the rake twang
like bluegrass music

It was Sunday
I remember because the wind
had been blowing in my ear all morning
and the clanging of the bells had scraped the canal raw
And the tender afternoon was loud with the deep
hum of your words

Your story was spices and metals I couldn't identify
Your story wandered like the veins on the back of your hand
when you pressed my forearm for emphasis
or help. Do you know I hardened to bear it?
-recast by the friction ridges of your fingertips
whorls that spin ever-outward?

It Wasn't the Flu

I was there
when Keiko died.

I was turning my ankles on the slick rocks
along Taknes fjord. Lonely and abondoned 
not me, but him. 
Homesick and agoraphobic
not me, but him.

He beached himself at my feet
at my pink rubber boots, his rubbery
white belly, glistening. A thin silver zipper

from between his pectoral fins to his fluke
opened, tooth by tooth.

And out flew sixty thousand June bugs
each with a thread tied to
each of its legs.

I grabbed three hundred sixty thousand threads
and was lifted out of my pink boots, 
over the orca, over the North Sea,
the oil platforms, Scotland and Ireland
and home.