An afternoon with Visions:

 Page ready and empty -

 hands fiddle with the ribbon,

 a yarn tangled around the steadfast ‘Z/z’.

 My mind pretends a search

 but truthfully conjures visions

 of your straight spine: imagines the steel rod

 implanted within to keep it straight,

 and your perfect breasts and nipples

 seen whilst performing a Louis Nowra play

 titled ‘Visions’ in which you played my sister

 though secretly I was never your brother.

 We lay together, another sunny afternoon -

 but not fully together;

 the journey never went so far, words and time

 seem to make us stumble and splutter

 like a fire that almost catches

 yet for reasons unexplained does not.

 Now another afternoon

 I sit at this computer writing words

 that somehow have the shape, these years later,

 of the underside of your ‘b’ breast,

 the gentle curve of your ‘l’ neck,

 of your thin, soft ‘m’ lips

 and long, long gently clasping ‘w’ fingers.

 This ‘s’ is your bent leg, the knee a valley of ‘v’,

 this ‘o’ a cheek soft as a baby;

 a remembered smell sends me reeling

 into that almost moment so long ago.

 I wonder these 27 years later

 what has happened to you and that steel rod

 or your sea green eyes

 and utterly sad heart that would not let go

 to come a’ journeying with me

 on a sunny afternoon similar and almost different

 from any other and I wish, as I have some times other,

 that I might have had the courage to face your temper

 and in its tempest shout like an undaunted sailor

 the ‘I love you’ that dwelt in my heart

 that moment, on that particular afternoon.