There is no darker hour and you’ve fled North,
I like to think, haunting where I’d love to stay.
But my train speeds south, in the wake of storm.
So in the wake of you, my heart careers
to think how in the midst of death, I am in life,
witness to your obsequies, come Wednesday.
No one can stay and leave. But as you know
it works the other way. The image in the jimmy-mirror,
with just a wipe of the hanky stays
eye-bright for eternity… Just so your poems run,
like the river at my window, and can’t be late, or early,
however fast or slow they make their journey.
But always and forever now, they go, and stay,
strong in themselves, as you were at leave-taking…
And would you put that one in your drawer?
Then pluck it out for print, months later,
to surprise me when a column fallen short,
at the hour’s last ditch, needs filling at its foot
with an inch or two – pitched against purity,
sprung from the fount of our shared grief?
… Choose life? O Flying Scotsman!
The lesson of poem-spotting jumps all points
and caesurae like the purest drug or drink
ever distilled to the page. What else? Please ask
when next you see them: Dunbar and Burns,
Hogg, Scott… MacLean and Hay, MacDiarmid…
what other route you might have taken
out of this earthly station and still been here in time?