Birthday Poem
Time-troubled
by a bladder that takes me back
to the body I let go of
in sleep, I make
a note to myself
to re-read ‘Gerontion’.
Eighty-five years,
compiuti as the Italians
say, and still
waiting for old age,
senilità, to catch up
but coming closer
each day to the four-year-old
at the next café-table
with his tablet and babychino,
or manfully, between
the tidelines, with bucket
and sand rebuilding Troy.
Sunrise. I throw back
five metres of white translucent
nylon on the blue
infinities of a day, like all
the many days before it, millennial
light-years in the making.
A Grace Note
Four in the morning. Stumbling back
to bed, the softness
of my pillow in the spread
of my fingers assumes
again, after so long, the still longed for
round of your head.
How does it feel,
out there in that undiscovered
country from whose bourne et cetera,
to be recalled, drawn back
to your name on my lips again,
the warmth of the flesh?
I recall the promise
we made and broke. Now,
on a grace-note
of unbodied restoration in the dream-space
timelessness of sleep,
I keep it. A late gift.
Coda
The better question: not
when or how,
but who, when the hour
arrives precisely on cue,
will be there
at the threshold, armed
with a name, a face, a family
likeness to claim
reunion. One of the stack
of counterparts and strangers
that my word, my writing
self has conjured up
to this or that occasion
as a stand-in then sent
packing, and who now,
uncalled for, simply
appears, as if the moment
this time round was his, and I
the shade that must fill it,
my breath
in his mouth, my pen in
his hand, the contract
between us finally sealed with no
escape clause, and on my part
no option but with good
grace to stand
aside and bid him
‘Welcome!’