Love's Geology

The slant of evening outside;
a flicker of cars on the Westway
and other tentative journeys
starting in office confines.

The four-to-twelve shift:
Westbourne Park;
we're couched in a call centre;
disembodied London voices
interrupt, pull me back
too late from seismic shifts:

the magma flowing out at rifts
dividing continents of self;
a vast internal range uplifts
in jagged ridges of conjecture;
I flame with forest fires
and all my secrets break from cover.

If I sleep an age of earth
and dream this mountainous story,
how we burned in molten free fall
to igneous ends of fissured rock,
let me wake tomorrow

a mountain echo;
a snow-capped muffle;
our peaks gouged by glaciers,
our terminal moraine
the melt-water of memory.