This is how the weather comes upon us: weighted

with deer, cannonballs and priests, the breath-taking
love of high summer. These are the sunhours you pass
prone in the grass of Nunhead Cemetery, savaged,
bio-boomed, waiting among the snails waiting
for rain, dragging their dry bellies through the grooves
of Victorian memento mori. The heat returns you;
makes you rehearse situations. Ear to the ground,
you cycle through things you’ve done, will do, should
but shan’t do, have stupidly done again. It’s all beyond
your body anyway. Tho Lost to Sight, in Memory Dear.

Accepting it was not your fault, you find, makes no difference.

But if you focus, you can hear the darkling, the salt water

striving to freeze all the way in Canada, & constellations
above it swimming, solidary. You worry you might die
not knowing rain this year, while over in Yukon, north
of the spruce line, a stoat scampers into the tundra unafraid,
unsheltered from the snow swirling into your mouth, eyes,
naively and accidentally you look back and say
there’s no way oot of the fire, your face so lovely & red,
glowing with your new Canadian accent.