On Valentine's Day

Look, We Have Come This Far

(For Peter) 

 

There was little we packed for this journey:

a fox’s  promise, the blue of a heron’s egg,

bed ends from a skip on Northbrook Road

so full of woodworm we had to throw them back.

Me riding backwards on the motorbike

as we went up through the Sally Gap, 

the curve of the Dublin mountains

holding its place on my lap.

Winters when pipes burst and snow lay

indolent on path and  rooftops,

we sat before a fierce fire, weaving baskets

while cane suppled in the basin beside us.

You asleep on the last seat of the bus,

I wishing you would wake

so that  you could see it too,

the sun burning up the fog at Delphi.

We didn’t pack for the children

we gave each other,

one with the language of your bones

the other with the thin of my skin,

my journey west with them to wait for you

to someday follow on. When you did,

you had nothing but the shape of my horizon

on which to lay your head.

Look, how we’ve come the other side of children.

Today as if there were no tomorrow left to us,

you calm me in the way clapped cymbals soothe

the swarming bees. Closer than breathing, we hold.

 from  An Urgency of Stars, Arlen House, 2010)