Line room dark eyelash see sky

Last night I wrote out the sestina Leo asked for, and it felt like I'd had all these words inside me already waiting to come out. They didn't tumble out easily, I had to tug at them, like coaxing a thread through the eye of a needle, but they were dormant, sleeping and last night they all woke up.

Sestina

Four walls and a chair make a room
And a light, don’t forget, things creep in the dark.
From your window (if you’re calm) you can see
An aeroplane trace a white cloud across the sky
Improper fractions, big and small separated by a line
A few millimetres thicker than your eyelashes.

My mother would give me butterfly kisses, her eyelashes
Tickling my cheeks as the coconut tree creaks outside my room.
The louvres in the door let in the light line by line,
golden soldiers in a regiment against the dark
And if you step out onto the balcony, the sun rises from the sky
Behind you, and the sweat of thirty degrees trickles into your eyes so you can’t see.

Look at the globe, look at the maps, can’t you see?
One kilometre is less than the width of an eyelash
Hannah gives you a notebook sheet with a poem of bird and sky
And you tack, stick, pin it to the board in your new room
next to a different Hannah, and the sky goes dark
earlier later in time, nothing is in a straight line.

On that last telephone call you held the line
As long as you could though I could see
She was gone before it was dark
And the hands brushed her eyelashes
Knowing there would be a room
For her soul somewhere beyond earth and sky

There are different kinds of leaving, to different sorts of sky
And different paths, though we patiently wait in the same line.
I wanted to tell you the room
was ready but then you said you imagined her walking out to sea.
A tear trembled on an eyelash.
All I could do was sit with you until it was dark.

I see the light regiments marching towards me through the dark.
And when the lightness is too much to bear I look at the sky,
Puzzling out the sun through a forest of eyelashes
Eyes almost closed, creased into a line.
Every day it gets easier to see
I am no longer in my old room

Where the dark was kept behind its battle line
And the sky was never too far away to see.
Even the fall of an eyelash causes an earthquake tremor in this room.