French Breakfast

After Lacan

My love is a black Labrador;
And darkly she moves, like the dawn
Through my thoughts
And in my dream I saw her last night,
And intuition spoke her name;

She finds me in moments of rejection,
When tiredness calls me back from reverie
Into a deeper kind of sleep,
Where my love is the far-away ocean,
That swallows whole the cobbled shores

Of our estranged fascination; steals deeper
Into a yawning, ageless memory, where
What becomes of strangers strangely met
Becomes an obsession of the senses
And I say I call my love the unnameable enigma

An identity I cannot dare to know, although
In my desire I demand to be loved,
Since this is not a gentle request I make of you;
Not some idle poem to be wasted on paper,
Nor a confession too soon after the act,

Since it is already far too late for language,
For in that language we see nothing but the shadows
Of ourselves, drowning in unfamiliar seas
Which blindly seem to say:
‘This love is beyond me’

And surely, then, it is beyond all else?
A leap too far for understanding
But too much a part of me to be quite so easily
Dismissed
For in my mind it is Neruda, waking

As if from a nightmare; dream weakened
And beaten by fears he cannot face, knowing
That what he wants to say can never be said;
That love can be a black Labrador,
That and so much more.

PCW October 2005