Underneath Tigerland

I

Underneath Tigerland, I lie floating:

A picture of Chagall’s lovers: blue, with flowers

Surrounded by everything and nothing, and all the spaces in between.

Lovers whom I know nothing of

Speak with the gesture of

Skin touching skin, a silent dance between fingers that flicker like lightning over the ocean.

The tigers stand above the path that hands make over mountains

I trace them through Nepal, fingers following love

Hidden like those secret ways that even the natives weren’t sure existed.

Love always makes the truest paths.

I wanted to tell the world all the secrets I’d learnt from listening at doors

But my hands told my mind that you already knew.

Practicality never begets honour but your eyes could bleed me dry of everything I’ve ever known.

II

At the day of the dead, all the ghosts begin to move under the skin of the earth

Thanking the living for understanding

And the barefoot children whom everyone has forgotten their names

Will dance out in the streets once more.

There are bones floating around underneath my skin

And the devil keeps asking me to dance

So I tell the café chair that faces out towards the street

How much I want the sky.

I had a dream that I was your teeth, and all I wanted was to let you know

How much I loved the sound of your voice

And the way that gold looks against your skin

All anyone ever wants is to be wanted.

But when we walked down the main strip in a city pouring with rain

Your hand was the furthest thing from mine

And it would have been easier to reach through those clouds and grasp the sun

Then it was to reach past what people think about love.

III

Recently I’ve been falling in love with the hands of strangers

Hoping that underneath their fingernails I will find the history I lost

But all I find is the ghosts of people I will never meet

And the skin of another whose scent makes me think I should remember.

Remember the white beach house, after the villa

When the moon cut through the sky while the waves played their love songs

And we’d stand before the water

Naked as the day we came and in that moment I knew what it must have been like to discover electricity.

My heart began beating that day,

Syncopated as it caught the rhythm of the planets

Changing until it circled yours perfectly

And forced my face towards yours like a light forced in the face by an interrogator.

IV

I will tell you all the things I’ve noted,

Counted down to a fox

Swept outwards

Rushing towards a river of brushes and trees

Along the winter line.

You told me I smelled of cinnamon and cloves and vanilla.

That I look like the moon you keep in your pocket

Saving for when the month grows full and deep and the oceans begin to teach the world about darkness.

You said you would pull me out then.

“Take off those skins and move towards the water” I say,

“And then I’ll teach you how to fly”

But the weight of the day hung about your feet and kept you still.

So I circle around you, facing inwards, floating upside-down while you keep to reality, and I, to Tigerland.