I was not bothered by the stitching under your eye
until we reached the plateau and you fell in the heather
where a barbed wire fence covered a seam in the sky,

stitching the clods of earth and the clouds together
as if it would take no more than a turn of the wind
to unthread each half and lift one clean of the other,

shearing the sky to a darkness that would never end,
with one of us tumbling upwards in perpetual freefall
the other strung on a barbed knot of steel by one hand,

all life on the globe scabbing over like a loose eyeball
unmoored on a nerve and dulling to cataracts slowly,
the dry world darkening, fences and heather and all.