Walls

An ice cream, an oblong of vanilla
from the café on the clifftop in the
gull-squawking, salty gale.

You unwrap the waxy paper
in silence, and I tongue-press
the ice cream into its angular cone,

choose my words carefully,
roll them round in my head
then say the wrong thing, say

nothing, the rain sheeting
between us, the tension dividing
and holding us together.