Waking

Hot night throws off its sheets,
leaving this June morning
suddenly cellar cool,

calm streets, stripped of ire,
all the howling baying,
output of the pubs

asleep in their grease,
or knocked out in flats
by one for the ditch

as starlings wait wary
for the first jets
to split sky and heads,

I turn over, exhale,
extend legs into
the cooling edge

of the marital bed
and search pillows
for reasons to rise.

It was in such moments 

as these that intimacy
took its tenancy

half tamed the anxious
wariness of newly shared
humanity, the repression

of the body’s ceaseless
ticking over, the urge
to seem immune,

to all the beastly stuff
left lurking amongst
the idealised heroics

of love’s first insistent
flush. It’s a comfort then
to turn and find buried

under matted hair slicked
with sleep’s quick dry dew
infinitely fallible, tangible; you.