“Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.”
—Anne Bradstreet
or in the morning when you told me us waking up
together was an experience you loved and I wanted
somehow to ensure the feeling I felt hearing that said,
and said by you, would never become a diminishing quality.
You rolled over and I held you.
There was rain in the fox-garden where last night before
sleeping we heard them fooling under the tall tree. We listened
ten minutes to the sound on glass and I kissed your shoulder blades.
Most music is quiet like this: the wind and a mountain statue,
a sculpture depicting a cellist bowing the cello with no bow.
Silence can be a language too of sorts; not a failure
but a lack of reason to account.
And it seems these moments can’t be repaid, yet nevertheless
we let one another draw each now and then a close to the tension
of waiting for heaven to confer its spiritual rewards, and so
we forget often we’re human and that our favours are unfit.
I straddle your hipbone. Your smell is familiar like a drug.
I dig into your breastbone with my nose and jaw: Foxes sharing
body-stuff and good time and the noise of rain; sun and sundown;
April and September; year’s beginning and year’s end.
I love you, and my love repays your love completely.
There’s not the sense that I owe you or that you owe me.
The actuaries close their records and start abashedly to count
the hours they spent counting, and what they thought that meant.
B.T. Joy is a British poet and short fiction writer living in Glasgow. He has also lived in London, Aberdeen and Heilongjiang, Northern China. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in magazines, journals, anthologies and podcasts worldwide including poetry in Yuan Yang, The Meadow, Toasted Cheese, Numinous: Spiritual Poetry, Presence, Paper Wasp, Bottle Rockets, Mu, Frogpond and The Newtowner, among many others. His debut collection of poetry, Teaching Neruda, was released in 2015 by Popcorn Press and his 2016 collection Body of Poetry is also available through Amazon. He can be reached through his website: http://btj0005uk.wix.com/btjoypoet