Nina Berkhout - from: pas de deux

excerpts from a work in progress

My drenched body slaps the frozen pond.
I push myself up and bits peel off. If I look over my shoulder
I will discover my heart’s rind fixed to the ice like a tongue.

*

He loves me, loves me not, loves me.

Chance secured her prosthetic petal
to the daisy game and I came to adore Tomas.

I want to store the things we said in a pine box,
lay our words to rest beneath a soft green shroud
but meaning is fragile like skulls of tiny shrews or little brown bats.

If I sickle my foot from the ankle, breaking
resilient vines if binding tarlatan nets ceased coiling
my convictions as I tread 

barefoot

across the river seeking refuge with ancient nuns
whose desires ferment in the basement,
immaculate and sealed inside fortified trunks

if I weren’t cut down to a rectangle
through his monocle if he weren’t as necessary to me
as movement in quarried tyndall I would sing

by damp chapel with frail-throated sisters,
the geometry of dissonance.

*

He came to me from the barre
as a number of voices in music, then as charcoal silence
pressing in at the room’s edge like gravel.