MURMURATION Poem by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

After a month I knew how it sounded when you were thinking: like the hissing of
heating pipes, the slow flushing of your cheeks before the warmth of
your musings would reach me. In the beginning we placed each other's glances just as we
had moved the furniture to places where we expected
silence in conversations or by the breakfast table in the corner where we might
entertain doubts and how, later, you would share these without it having the atmosphere
of a lecture: I would like to speak about the sparrow I say
each evening, against my better judgement because sparrows easily

converge and come apart again without flying at each other, love is a
theatrical bird, air acrobatics my father said once and after retiring
he only looked above: for the birds and for a glimpse of God.

I hid my sweaty hands underneath the table, if my fingers were wings
then my armpit would rest between my thumb and forefinger, I
move them like beaks, a body has many ways of not
being a body. We transfer to the couch to make room for
questions, there alone is space for sighs of relief, we see before
us how our thoughts cause clouds of sparrows and shapes we cannot express, as usual

you ask how many birds make a swarm and how many acts are necessary
to fuse us together as lovers, when you might place my glance
so that it hangs like a painting in which you can see much, but never everything,
that is the art of adoration. The mattress is there where speaking
is superfluous and silence is included like caresses but as the cold floor reaches
my feet I seek a place for you in a house where everything
remains unmoved unless we move it ourselves, only the murmuring of our
heads causes us to converge without coming any closer.

A lecture is a speech on a subject about which you know
so much that you cannot free fall, whereby your vocal chords do not change
like the plumage of the sparrow at the end of the summer when he has become
homesick, flying over the introduction to get to the thank you at the end, sleep softly

my love, there in the horizon of my sight, if I didn't know any better my head
would be a watchtower, without you knowing I see everything that rages within you.