there are secrets tucked inside your pockets even now

we have been going places and seeing things, we have been having new adventures in threes and fours, on our unsteady feet. it has been a long time since we learned to read maps, to know exactly where we are in the world, and it is hard now to step and not know where your foot will land.

at the zoo we saw a slow loris, a collection of fur and smallness that you would dream of scooping up and carrying home in the pocket of your pinafore. we were happy to crouch at the window and watch it swing one hand in front of the other, slothlike and graceful. we were happy to know that it produces poison from its wrists to suck into its mouth for bitter bites. there were tortoises like cracked stones and meerkats in sleepy piles, and no tiger but instead a child that cried and cried.

we escaped from the art gallery, carefully refusing to look back. we lingered at the museum and needed to be shooed out by guides who tracked out progress on their walkie-talkies. (i was comforted to hear that we were passing through the mammal room, that we were entering the next section, that we had walked down the stairs, the static adding age to each transmission.) we sat in a park in the sunshine, and although the grass is never as green and lush as it looks from a distance it was soft enough.

we sat unsteadily together, knee to knee, and pulled an oar each, trying to work out how to fit our limbs together. splash splash and circles, and then we hit the right beat and the boat moves and we laugh. we are tangled in ropes and seriousness, clambering and falling and grabbing and shouting. we are all there and the waves are with us and the wind is quiet and then loud, the sails filling and pulling us sideways.

in my dream the sea is flat and we see the dolphins we have been looking for, and behind them a whale that dives beneath us and tumbles the rowboat into the green soft silence underneath