Paul Dawson

Lines of Desire
for Bronwyn Lea

The movement of a narrative, some will tell you,
can be charted on a graph. To begin with

there are trees and their uncomplicated growth. There
is one’s life and that’s what life is. If you listen closely

you can hear the granules of coffee sliding from the spoon
to the bottom of the plunger. And then

something happens. The line of the graph
begins to curve upwards, like an eyebrow of doubt,

like a bird contemplating flight. The something is desire —
it cannot be any more specific than that.

Like the arc from her smoking fingertips
to a mouthful of lips, the way you watch water

climbing up the inside of your treasured, treasured tea cup,
this movement has consequences, rising like steam —

follow the line, watch desire break against itself
at the peak of the curve, the email that should not

have been sent, that had to be sent
as if the story was only in your mind.

And then the slow decline, or perhaps the collapse
it may be nothing, it could be madness, it could be

a sparrow’s whisper on the edge of your skin.
Either way, there is the unravelling —

but how can one wrap up desire? The moment
when one is blasted into enthralment

one shivering soul, the glimpse of a foot,
her voice on the raining street, a hint

of the other way out.