As water into sand
As cloud into clear air
The day’s dissolved and gone
Sweetly without sound
So waited and so dear
Leaving us alone.
Though love itself should pass
Or break on brutal reef
For lovers two come care
But never bitterness
Knowing that in life
Such days are.
Music and the Heart run hand in hand
Naked over the shining sand,
In the summit song of youth
A quiet quick catch of the breath.
My love and I in all agree
As one, save this thing only:
Seraph my soul’s content
More longed than desert well
Before I loved or knew you were
I spoke as I had eyes,
Alone to walk the dripping woods of spring
While daisies spy you?
‘All things are flux: there’s nothing fast,’
Said Heraclitus, ages past,
The host of hills encamped around,
The sleepless army of the stars,
As homing bird the prisoning hand releases,
As tide, unyoked, brims up the beach anew,
…the thunder growling,
And winds mounting, and the sky falling,
And night, and you not here.
As water into sand
As cloud into clear air
Come death suddenly from the sea or cloud,
With the blast of thunder and the blinding shroud,
My little son, whose face I never saw,
Who could not wait to bless your father ’s eyes
Part of me for ever is the January morning
Coming into the Clyde in the frosty moonlight
Above the great ship’s lifting bow
I watch the Pole Star nightly stand,
Sweet solitude, my supple slave,
Delicious concubine
Dark sea dark land lie close beneath
The muffling guilt of night,
My nine-hours son, so wrinkle-faced
Wry concentration of distaste
To find your Person so displaced,
The sun like a centaur leaping the ranges
Shoots to the heart my garden, shatters
The dew in a volley of wild carillons
You spoke, after long years, about the morning
That followed the night your first-born son was born:
Waylaid by Handel’s theme, I think of you
Now half a world away, and hear you say
‘His music always seems like coming home.’
You are late coming home
To the house we share
An audible silence
Chills the air
My love, I watch you thread your way, and turn
with a small timeless smile, and trail your trolley
unhurried through the gate of no return.
My dearest love, at seventy-nine
You’re not, and never have been, mine.
My dearest love, where’er you are,
just through that door, beyond that star,
Spring, at a bound. Once more the colourful chorus,
Daffodils first declare their lyric yellow,
Now for your birthday the single prunus bough,
by neighbour ’s kindness spared on a sentenced tree
… obliterating in instant mini-time
a universe of suns and planets
with or without their myriad forms of life,
Always a step ahead, you’re eighty-three,
My life-support, contending other me,
Down arches of the years I hear your voice
explaining serials of our late departures,
Six years since your last birthday in our midst
seems yesterday, in this same so-loved house,
For ever is the promise. I will trust
To share with you the same light and same dust.
‘Eternity and time becoming one’
you wrote for Daniel’s one day in our world.
Wrapped in my gown of self-regard sublime
I heard your voice arrive from outer space.
Knowing the time was short
Yours was the instant thought
‘Let’s go up to the Rocks!’
Ten years since that incalculable day
When from all worlds we know you slipped away