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Lynne Wycherley

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Listening

Over the gulf of the dark, a thousand-mile
sway of green water, love makes its link,
fibreoptic, your breath translated into light.

My ear cupped to a handset, I’m listening
for the heartbeats under your words,
systole and diastole, our binary code

and I think of light’s racing pulse,
the thousands of voices hurling through glass,
silica hairs in a skin of steel

ducking the Pacific, surfacing for air,
pitched in waves through the veils of space,
mesosphere and ionosphere,

to an ink-rinsed emptiness
where dragonflies of metal sip the sun,
solar-panelled wings gripping the dark,

antennae pointing to earth’s blue lake
where I wait to catch the sleet of your voice
and on roofs, in towns, on hills, at Madley,

Docklands, Goonhilly, other ears tilt to the ebb
of night. Moon-white dishes scattered like shells.
Listening. As if to some other lover.

 

Page(s) 6

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