Your touch suprises me

like a breath of sea air in the city

and I don’t know which way to move

in the opposing landscapes of my senses.

As if, crossing a street I have lived in for years

the taste of salt comes to my mouth

and I lose sight of what I’m walking towards:

a window that has caught and reflected

all that is familiar; or the edge of this island

from where we can at last look out.

The way we can’t remember heat, forget

the sweat and how we wore a weightless

shirt on chafing skin, the way we lose

the taste of raspberries, each winter; but

know at once, come sharp July, the vein

burning in the curtain, and from that light

- the block of sun on hot crushed sheets -

the blazing world we’ll walk in,

was how it was, your touch. Nor the rest,

not how we left, the drunkenness, just

your half-stifled, clumsy, frightened reach,

my uncurled hand, our fingers, meshed,

-like the first dazzled flinch from heat

or between the teeth, pips, a metal taste.

When we are gone

our lives will continue without us

– or so we believe and,

at times, we have tried to imagine

the gaps we will leave being filled

with the brilliance of others:

someone else gathering plums

from this tree in the garden,

someone else thinking this thought

in a room filled with stars

and coming to no conclusion

other than this –

this bungled joy, this inarticulate

conviction that the future cannot come

without the grace

of setting things aside,

of giving up

the phantom of a soul

that only seemed to be 

while it was passing.

Just round a corner of the afternoon,

Your novel there beside you on the bed,

Your spectacles to mark your place, the sea

Just so before the tide falls back,

Your face will still be stern with sleep

As though the sea itself must satisfy

A final test before the long detention ends

And you can let the backwash take you out.

The tall green waves have waited in the bay

Since first you saw the water as a child,

Your hand inside your father’s hand, your dark eyes

Promising you heartbreak even then.

Get on with it, I hear you say. We’ve got no choice.

We left the nursing home your tired chair.

They stole the sweets and flowers anyway

And bagged your clothes like rubbish in the hall.

Here in the flat your boxed-up books and ornaments

Forget themselves, as you did at the end.

The post still comes. The state that failed to keep the faith

Pursues you for its money back. There’s nothing worse,

You used to say, than scratting after coppers.

Tell that to the clerks who’d rob your grave,

Who have no reason to remember how

You taught the children of the poor for forty years

Because it was the decent thing to do.

It seems there’s no such thing as history.

We must have dreamed the world you’ve vanished from.

This elegy’s a metaphysical excuse,

A sick-note meant to keep you back

A little longer, though you have no need to hear

What I must say, because your life was yours,

Mysterious and prized, a yard, a universe away.

But let me do it honour and repay your gift of words.

I think of how you stared into the bonfire

As we stood feeding it with leaves

In the November fog of 1959,

You in your old green coat,me watching you

As you gazed in upon

Another life, a riverside address

And several rooms to call your own,

Where you could read and think, and watch

The barges slip their moorings on the tide,

Or sketch the willows on the further shore,

Then in the evening stroll through Hammersmith

To dances at the Palais. Life enough,

You might have said. An elegant sufficiency.

There was a book you always meant to write.

You turned aside and lit a cigarette.

The dark was in the orchard now, scarf-soaking fog

Among the fallen fruit.The house was far away,

One window lit, and soon we must go back

For the interrogation to begin,

The violence and sorrow of the facts

As my mad father sometimes dreamed they were

And made the little room no place at all

Until the fit was past and terrible remorse

Took hold, and this was all the life we had.

To make the best of things. Not to give up.

To be the counsellor of others when

Their husbands died or beat them. To go on.

I see you reading, unimpressed, relentless,

Gollancz crime, green Penguins, too exhausted

For the literature you loved, but holding on.

There was a book you always meant to write,

In London, where you always meant to live.

I’d rather stand, but thank you all the same, she said,

A woman on the bus to Hammersmith, to whom

I tried to give my seat, a woman of your age,

Your war, your work.We shared the view

Of willowed levels, water and the northern shore

You would have made your landing-place.

We haven’t come this far to give up now.

The flame-red moon, the harvest moon, 

Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing, 

A vast balloon, 

Till it takes off, and sinks upward 

To lie on the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon. 

The harvest moon has come, 

Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon. 

And the earth replies all night, like a deep drum. 

So people can’t sleep, 

So they go out where elms and oak trees keep 

A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush. 

The harvest moon has come! 

And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep 

Stare up at her petrified, while she swells 

Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing 

Closer and closer like the end of the world. 

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat 

Cry `We are ripe, reap us!’ and the rivers 

Sweat from the melting hills.

What name do I have for you? 

Certainly there is no name for you

In the sense that the stars have names

That somehow fit them. Just walking around, 

An object of curiosity to some, 

But you are too preoccupied

By the secret smudge in the back of your soul

To say much and wander around, 

Smiling to yourself and others.

It gets to be kind of lonely

But at the same time off-putting.

Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way, 

The one that looped among islands, and

You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.

And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.

There is light in there and mystery and food.

Come see it.

Come not for me but it.

But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.