Title: Ex

Author: Craig Sherborne

In: Sport 36: Winter 2008

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2008

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Verse Literature

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Sport 36: Winter 2008

Ex

page 227

Ex

Some nights you bleak into me.
There's no point you doing it, I'll never visit your grave.
Graves are an insteadness, a letterbox of brass
with your final address: 1997 Died.
I'm fresh in new love now, in that ruthless phase—The Erotic Trance.
You don't count as competition.
Stare all you like from your curtain of sods, only the moon
has stared back for years.

But on those 'some nights' it's you who comes to me—
Obsessest of all the Heart-Broken.
You might as well be alive the way it happens:
I'll be reading and There! you walk between lines,
you mince along words, the streets of sentence.
Lowell's Mermaid sonnets your latest imposition;
at 'It's time to turn your pictures to the wall'
you slip through the O in 'to' like a tunnel.
I let you dance me across the Lowell sand,
the M of our shadows hand in hand, a pornography
of us coiling breath-first onto the page-dream.
I know where that leads—I'll wake to imagine your back
curved in question-mark sobs: 'Leave that unspeakable bitch
you're with. Move home to me or I'll kill myself.'
On good nights it's as the Lowell says: 'Like God,
I almost doubt if you exist.'