January air is amniotic. 

February will come like a birth or excision. 

This is love right now: 

Christmas bushes burning red through the mud. 

This is a portrait of you

with a trowel and sweaty nape.

I may keep the soil under my fingernails,

carry it 'til Spring, return and dig my hands in.

I may leave this moment here, in the nectar of the grevilleas,

when the sun takes its warm hand from my cheek.

The youngest leaves shiver with a breeze too weak for me to feel.

Then I feel.