South Countours

They are travellers, the fingers that intertwine in celebration of the winter that frames this South in some kind of monotonous murmur.

Fragmented vows asleep upon the sand.

A future in the arms of the seaweed-gathering fisherman, shod and storm-worn. The lighthouse, a botany book, and a frantic dance at sunset.

The seconds are counted until it hides behind the steep slope memory insists on preserving as mere crystals of absence. I notice the coldness of the sea, the stubborn waves, the crossing currents. Inevitable crossings suspended in the comfort of sharp secrets locked away at the end of the afternoon.

By now, the light lets itself be lulled into the sweet hypnosis of sleep.

I watch the clouds scatter, and in my ear pulses the shell mistreated by a burning liquid that once scorched my throat. Gentle waves caressing the feet, a breeze coiling around my neck.

Bound unions. As tightly bound as limpets nestled in the mirror of other times swallowed by the tide. Breakers dressed in lilac and a seagull that will lead me home.

Turning the corner, the cat draws circles on the pavement, yellow as a remnant of sun lost inside the lamp. Night lifts its face, nameless, and the streetlamps let fall their light like a silenced howl. The houses, still, breathe absence and do not embrace us.

And silence howls, but no one lays claim to it.

I find myself holding on to the oddness of shared hibernation, of halted clocks and the white turned to grey, emerging in this everything nourished by the nothing I insisted on greeting with empty hands.

It's the longing to stay and the urge to flee.

To walk the wire and seek balance.

I begin the climb I had planned in detail, step by step, in a red that stains me. I want to find a lost toadflax among the meeting of yellow flowers, in the freedom I lack. Or splash in the stream that suddenly overflowed. And sit at the foot of the pomegranate tree that, for a century, resisted all the tempests.

It will be from the top that I wave to you, a toast to the distance that moves us. A cicada in the shadow of the menhir, a valley at my feet encircled by mist against time.

A drop in temperature. The adjustment of unrest.

The trembling wheatfield in the black-and-white outline where the darkness of blue fits. The helpless sliding of hours along the curve of the cloud. A night that blows me the stars as the horizon leans over the chapel.

Chewing dreams in this sovereign peace, I return to you the salty caress, the silence, and the unaltered air.

I am okay here.