After W. B. Yeats
When you are sad and fat and workmen no longer
look at you as you pass, and your breasts droop,
and when you are ancient and the grandchildren fail
to recognise the sweet lure, the lily skin
(that caught so many men, and one woman),
when you show them the photos, beside the fire,
don’t speak to them of me, leave me out
of your past: a poacher in a walled reserve.
Don’t you be pining for the books you lived
or feel regret for all that might have been:
by then we’d no longer be together, you’d not
be speaking to me, nor ever have read this poem.