A China Cup Won'T Do - Poem by Stephanie Street

it's too vulnerable, too breakable
to carry the weight of
the waters running through
these seven hundred and thirty-
one days. Brittle
as dead bones (sorrowfully
missing the marrow) , transparent as skin -
How could it suffice?

73:
It sits stoutly between us,
oceans like a cordon round our hearts, holding them
at Safe Distance,
chaperoning against the mad,
mad freefall of the soul.

173:
On the Malabar Coast
it licks warmly at our feet, gathers us like babies.
I swell like a raincloud,
filled to bursting with you, every cell
made fecund, on the brink
of an electric storm.

439:
The catastrophic tide breaks,
from a haiku watercolour, from the Old Stories
smothering lives to mud, sucking hearts
from bones. We watch
(like the World, a little broken) from the safety
of land.

731:
Mist on the mirror
dulls the kohlsmudge out of which I see,
in the finger trails,
shiny clear, portions of You -
soap-smooth body, slick as a pebble.
The waiting day is ours to unwrap
like a sweet.