Veins of a Bonfire

and for our fifth anniversary, wood; at that age love’s roots are hopeful, flexible, damp: feeling fresh earth with fingers stretching and toes padding. A landscape found. My memories are rings of bark in rotation, aging and looping nostalgic sap solidified, held within amber - a slow golden molasses of year within decade within time within circular wooden promises moving, expanding. For my scabs there are bent twigs, plucked and picked by a curious child. My eyes have been bugs, dark and closed below trunk, shielded and sheltered in mud before opening with experience: growing tails bushy and teeth sharp, becoming acorns that gaze and look upward, that blink and spy, that climb with squirrels hoarding their plunder near clouds - and my skin, once covered in leaves green, dotted in crisp morning dew, now changes colour to curling oranges of autumn and stubborn brown creases, cracked into wrinkled veins of bonfire clusters dry. A prepared pyre. Yet my mouth – forever poised, forever responding – is fern, is evergreen that doesn’t wilt but gapes and breathes and learns and beckons: planting seeds and watering saplings young, word by word, syllable by syllable, bulb by bulb