On a morning like this, a bruised dawn, fat with rain and murmurs of far off thunder, the air is dense with spent showers. In a garden at the far end of a forty-year lane with sand instead of grass and soft white seastones marking the lines between walking paths and growing places. Snails, their shiny brown shells almost too much for them to bear, slide across rocks, inching up stems and over leaves, pushing away the plump droplets of night. The breeze is sharp with the scent of salt, of soaked charcoal, and of dust smothered by the downpour. Its scent trapped in my dark hair.
The clouds whipped to land, streaked blue, black and grey, like your hair, curled like your fingers in sleep, arching towards the blistered palm of the shore.
The mind gathers disparate things and there is no memory; only then, now, in the purple dawn before you were born, before sleep, before day. I’ve brought you here, to this place, before sunrise, to watch the snails move slower than the hands of a clock, to nestle beneath the broad, thick leaves, before the sun bleaches the day white with its awful stare.
I love you.
Evocative; subtle