my blue skirt is the colour of cornflowers and fans out to my knees. I can plunge my hands into pockets lined with yellow flowers. I would wear my blue skirt like this: with knee high brown boots and a blouse and when I wore it I was born for climbing through your window, or a window, any window. my blue skirt is for mock-fainting into a lovers arms and the blue skirt is for winking with the sun shining in my eyes and for splitting fruit and spitting the stone and for skipping on the way home or climbing up a green hillside with the sky stretching as equally cornflower blue on all sides and setting out flowers on your bookshelf with the evening light shining on them while I lie on my stomach on your bed and read until you come home so I am going to sell my blue skirt online and move to bluff and farm oysters and look at the cut of the rocks against the strait and work long hours and sleep longer ones and have almost all daylight hours in the summer but a cold wind on my back and almost all night to sink into in the winter and even more wind gusting straight from Antarctica, bringing in the dreams of scientists who gave up family life and routine and days you can navigate without a torch, and the slow crack of ice sluicing off into the ocean and the depths of the water beyond cold and dark and micro-planktons easing their way out of permafrost, and the small fossil skeletons of centuries past easing out of the ice and across the water, sinking to a depth so sunless I cannot fathom it, a depth where movement happens without sight, and standing far above on the dark rocks with the sea water running across them and the barnacles that rough the skin to bleeding, the wind chaps my lips and lends a ring of scorn around them, like from too much kissing, or giving too much head