Just the right amount of squeeze 

at my hip

of a lemon 

on the pasta we craft for each other

of the sponge he knows I don’t like to touch when wet.

A tongue, a croissant, a bottom smack, 

exactly when we wanted one

A well-timed tease, balletically treading that tightrope line 

from this now, to the next, to the next to the next please

 

Moments studded above our heads, plotting a constellation 

I think of a cow, 5 legs and no nose, 

the one my sister drew at 4 or 3 years old

pride of place in the living room.

They rarely land where we aimed or planned, these small, spangling points in time, 

but each a scruffy, gorgeous dog star

lengthening a Fresian eyelash.

 

Sometimes they are bigger, like the blue weekend we snuck between the quarantines. 

Slipped the one bed dungeon flat we'd roiled and rollicked in for months 

two fitful baby bears filling the carpets with fur and sweat

and never speaking to our neighbours.

He drove me into the Dorset darkness,

and after a stiff journey and drink,

      an astonishment of stars

              and a different plane of quiet

                         not quiet, but total, carbonised focus

our testiness affronted by the taut purple muscle of the milky way

dunked in indigo and anaesthetised across the sky. 

 

We are duly disciplined and a new coordinate is marked.

Andromeda, the bawdy duchess of our interstellar tapestry, 

affixed to the thrust of the globular gravities between us.

The most distant body that ever seduced the bare, human eye (one of us had heard),

pinned to the tip of a jaunty heffer’s hoof.

 

You see? You raise and reduce me 

to the level of the sea and the starlight

which I never thought I would spend so much time writing about. 

 

But now, Vaccula Aeternam Minor beams down over the Jurassic Coast.