I’ve had these words on the wall above where I work, for thirty years. I typed them out on the typewriter I wrote my first poetry on. The photograph you see here is of a copy of a copy of a copy of the original piece of paper, long since too tattered to be particularly readable. The words come from a James K Baxter poem, as part of his Pig Island Letters sequence. There are two truths for my life contained within these two stanzas, but, in the way of poetry, the meaning remains mysterious and the only way to respond is with poetry of my own.

The first:

“for what we did not have: that hunger caught

Each of us, and left us burnt,

Split open, grit-dry, sifting the ash of thought.”

I responded with this:

For me, it’s the idea that it’s all those things that hurt us also shape us, drive us forward, make us determined to really live.

The second:

“The hope of the body was coherent love.”

Those words rang so true for me but I never could quite work out what they meant - my eyes flicked to the sentence nearly every day, it still remained like a beautiful dream half-remembered on waking, the meaning of which you can’t catch - the dream drifting away from you the more you try to hold onto it.

Recently though, I fell in love wth a man I’ve been waiting my whole life to find, and all of a sudden James K’s words came clear. The hope of my body was love I could understand . That’s what coherent love is. Love your body can understand, that you can feel with your whole heart.

In response, I wrote these words, made this painting.

The hope of my body

has always been this:

You and I

lying in the light

of a gentle room

learning the language

of our kisses.

You feel like home.

And now, maybe, finally, I can take James K’s words off the wall. Find new territory to explore.