You are that Thursday, Last August

You vanished,
like a hot-headed lion, and rode off
into the sun-set with me on your back. I wanted to grip,
tightly, onto your balmy curls
which curdled, splitting,
on the singed face of a day —

beaming, soft, you broke out in blue, casting
up the sky, the way a beachgoer lays out a towel.
We yawned and drifted into another sleep.
Light humanness. The relief of a summer’s morning.
You rolled across us, stretched like a lolling cat.
Eleven o’clock fizzed

and spilled over into lunch. The hours lost themselves
and instead went swimming, weaving
in and out of river reeds.
You conducted your orchestra of trees
whilst we sat on the bank, tangled
in ourselves.

I know you’re out there still, Thursday. Frolicking
in metallic licks of sapphire-blue. Like a peacock,
you trail feathers behind you, striking the heel
of your palm on a broken drum.
For a final trick, you set the sky alight,
scattering thumbed matches about you with their charred tips.

A thief, you drop stars like pennies, happy to leave
the silver lady, and, looking for love,
she settles, reclining in the crook of her sky.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Ashen, she sighs and breathes indigo light,
spilling her ink: hot tar, sticky night.

Holly Pollard is a writer, poet, and book editor originally from Dorset, UK. Her work focuses primarily on subjects of art, architecture, and ecology, often drawn from themes of landscape, aesthetics, and the environment. She lives and works from a sailboat, currently sailing the Mediterranean. Her published poems feature in the upcoming edition of TERRIBLE magazine, and Issue 05 of horizon. For more on her work, please visit hollypollard.com