All These Miles by Julia Copus

What can I tell you with all these miles pulled taut
between us and time split like fruit so everything

happens to me two whole hours before
it happens to you? Here, already, I can feel

the dumbstruck night disintegrate. Listen: it is
the hour of the dog - a thousand husk-throats hacking

a beach-long ache of sky. Beneath it someone
is walking me home, just inches from the quiet

shift and swell of the sea that takes us,
almost without sound, past the statue-white

chairs in the tea-garden crowding
the waterfront, facing seawards like ghosts.

My door is open; we climb into its shadow,
saying nothing, until only the moon is left

unchanged and familiar, and his face closer in, his
breathing like the sound of the whole sea in one, small

uninhabited shell; like the sighing of steam which starts
deep in the pistons, then shudders an engine into life.






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