Katy
Luxem

Lay down the sharp scythes

        let them spoon one another

        in the shady stack of afternoon.

        Sleep becomes another language

        for painting people, brushstrokes

        of their best noon-light faces

        hidden, plain and blue as peasants.

        Now the shoes go, no pretence

        for when they’ll get up again.

        Even the livestock retreat, no longer

        part of the foreground; not every surface

        of living is work. Remember

        how the composition holds cloudless

        sky against manual labour, how both exist

        in this landscape. So somehow

        when they wake, when they rise up

        and go like the soft smoke of home,

        you will still be here in the grass,

        the soft impression of a body finally at rest.