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)
