Poetry

Tesseract

just as a cube is to a square
and a tesseract is to a cube
so this evening with you is
to the song in my head
which searches on the wrong pavements
for its accidental notes
finding instead only fungible things
and lost as the travelling air
(in her slippers)

I bestow a buttery kiss on each eyelid
of the axis of doubt
you are everything
that I’m sure wasn’t there yesterday

but the butterscotch flavour eludes me
and on the inside
we am a balcony
looking across at so much snow
humming and failing
to taste my half-remembered

after midnight
the origami palace we made is lost to us both
it’s right there as it was before
but the portico and all those staircases
now look more like some deserted orchard
and the closing door of her bedroom
and the sacred emblem of our fearsome burning
tyres

James Lewis