Honey on rocks

I bent down
chasing the coin devils with my hands – like that
moment in Schindler’s List, when he drops the ring
made from a filling – I bent down
and saw thin lines of light
through the trees.

‘Three pounds thirty,’ you’d said,
standing at the till, voicing the ‘th’s, like in ‘thine’;
they weren’t thin like in … well … ‘thin’.
Maybe you knew they weren’t right, and you wished
it'd been ‘two pounds twenty’ or ‘four pounds forty’, but
they were right to me.

The coins in my hands
had danced and floated into the air,
tricked me,
and now rolled like consonants
across the floor.
I was ashamed.

‘You’re losing your money,’
you chuckled - a waterfall
of soft laughter
down the shapes
of your words,
and the gravel shale
at the end of my soul
heart
splashed and filled over;
I looked down inside
and saw
liquid light.

I'd never heard you laugh before,
and now I wondered,
wondered at the honey,
the honey
you knew
within you.