Xia Fang’s ‘Reflection on the Westminster Bridge Attack March 2017’

from a view of the sky tunnel

two gunshots ring out on the street
fell and scatter the passers-by

when you stand by the bridge
or simply walk along
the street lamp contemplates ripened wheat
ripe heads bent low

he said he liked the word fertile
and that blood must atone for blood

Before skin : eyes :

shy : brown : dreaming timid under lashes :
thieving : stealing sideways glances :

so many little thefts :
at face : at hair : at freckles : at neck :

at hands : at fingers :
at curve and swell beneath dress :

beneath white blouse : beneath : beneath.
*
Skin : what is your testimony?

Whose fugitive hands : long gone :
stroked you : coaxed :

a wanted : unwanted :
wanted : unwanted :

shiver : tremble : quiver : quicksilver :
while you were dreaming : fledgling dreams :

dreaming other : dreaming girl hands?
What is your memory?

Who touched you here : and here?
Who raised his hairy knee :

between your bare legs :
in an empty change room :

whilst others danced The Wedding Dance?
Who arranged to meet you :

during a school lunch break :
furtive amidst the trees and thickets :

the rocks and sculptured ponds :
of the Veale Gardens?

Who lay beside you in the long grass : whispering?
What secrets : have you kept all these years :

what imprints : what scars?
*
Later : I threw away his letters :
the childish rounded script :

something given : something taken away :

Whether from anger : or shame :
I cannot say: the only letters discarded.
*
She lay beneath me : still as a fallen bird :

I was skinbone : stripling : sapling :
lowering my mouth to : her mouth :

my lips to : her lips :
to the soundtrack of Carole King’s Tapestry :

and she : white bloused : golden-haired :
beneath me : still as a fallen bird :

When our lips touched : she didn’t resist :
didn’t respond : and my kiss :

faltered : foundered :
fell between us : still as a fallen bird :

that did not breathe again.
*

We danced : my hands :

(do I imagine this?) : on her white-bloused waist :
round and round : circling : never arriving :

the moments distanced : silent :
the recovered footage of a lost movie :

girl from another land : girl from another world :
girl template : temple of my longing :

girl never found : long lost : girl never known :
How could she know of my longing :

when it was a bone not yet unearthed?
*
If I dream of her now :

I enter the dream I had of her then :
insolence gleaming in her eyes :

at the corners of her fourteen-year-old mouth :
I enter the dream of my heart :

its adolescent pounding :
the dream of my novice lips :

in their timid uncertainty.
*
To fully apprehend a moment :

a singular moment in a vast plurality :
pluck it from obscurity :

and hold it : for a lifetime : with tenderness :
with the concentrated gaze : of the senses :

until its petals open : delicate : flush with colour :
as with : the thirty seven years :

since : the still life : of my fallen kiss.
*
With or without skin :

on skin : against skin : inside skin :
touching : pressing : filling : squeezing : caressing :

imagination partakes : helps itself :
to the fruits of eros : the imagined touch :

the imagined lovemaking : thrust and moan of it :
feel and sound of it : body to body :

spooned : astride : entwined :
sweat and breath : hunger : compulsion :

weight of cupped breasts : tongue’s soft questing :
on nipple : on furrowed skin :

between : between :
moistness on moistness :

her raised bud : my dripping chin :
hunting sighs : hunting shudders :

abdomen’s involuntary contraction :
pungent smell of it : tongued bitterness :

tongued nectar of it :
fingers on glans : on shaft : on testicles :

entering and : entering:
blurred thought of it :

want and want of it : tensed muscles :
arched back : thrust and moan of it :

fullness of it : hope in it :
promise of it : release from it :

transitory release from it.
*
At my very heart :

(in its rhythmic beat :
axiom : gravity well : lightning rod : leitmotif :

the chamber music of love :
call it ventricular love : call it aortic love) :

is the dream of a woman :
a woman with many faces : many bodies :

known : and unknown :
a woman never displaced : by circumstance :

Always there : in the years of solitude :
the years of living alone :

the years between lovers :
and whilst there were lovers :

and in the midst of a marriage :
the dream of a woman :

same dream : different dream :
dream of being accepted :

dream of being received :
with open arms : with open heart :

with love : with ferocity : uncompromised dream :
that no woman can match :

from which I must : always wake.
*
Meet me here :

where the wilderness of the unspoken :
meets the wilderness of the spoken :

where mirages shimmer in the distance :
in the fierce heat :

I am tired of sifting : my heart’s rumpled
pornography : I am tired of trying : to articulate :

Meet me here : and fill my ears :
with sweet nothings : show me :

the ripe body of your lust :
Bring to me : your willingness :

your questing hands : your needing lips :
Bring to me : the sly curve of your mouth :

dancing devils in your eyes :
your unappeased heart :

Bring to me : your naked loveliness :
your unasked questions : your hot wet urgency :

Take from me : the fire from my furnace :
my quiet incantations : my un-beached poems :

Come to me : unguarded : vulnerable :
heart and body open :

Meet me here now :
before night’s sharp cold arrives :

and let us fuse : in the heat of this wilderness.