and yet you talk of love.

i have said nothing,

drunk my drink,

made appropriate gestures

in response to your remarks

i have not been indecorous,

have not given myself away

our eyes meet: i do not look away

neither do i hold your gaze too long.

i notice the weave of your jeans

the one place where

your hair curves out instead of in -

a mark of where you slept, perhaps,

hotel linen for rented dreams.

the minutić:

these things register

i note them down

as a scientist would.

i have the measure of you,

marking out your eyes, smile, nose

things i had not remembered

not your voice, the way you shape your vowels

your lips your breath and tone and pause

the constituents of

your language

what you say

this i had not remembered

only that when i saw you first

my heart snagged

like a burr on a trouser leg.

and yet you talk of love,

lightly, as though it were an easy thing

something to decide upon:

‘today i will fall in love’ a date

to be remembered,

as though it were something

you could help,

or notice.

and i laugh, brittle as peanuts,

dry-throated. this is a game,

rented linen, borrowed words.

does the seed know the soil,

the soil the seed? still, it grows.