Time, gentlemen!

Also time for me to sleep. Last one for now.

One door closes

I closed the door behind him, and watched him walk

Silently the short distance to his car

Loaded

With boxes and the bag-ends

Of six years.

No drama; that was long done

Only the last grains of time called

Trickling unheeded through the glass.

Unfinished conversations

Muse

What did you think I’d think

In this electric afterglow

Of thought-current

Crackling between the two of us

That this is mundane

That every man I meet generates a power surge

In every neuron, so that my brain aches with aftershocks
And afterthoughts

And half-finished trains departing without you on board?

I cannot allow you the comfort

Of that.

Not even at this distance

It’s done now.

Connection made, knot tied, never to be untangled

Whether life or love come between.

I know it well enough for what it is

And know you do

Younger in years but wiser perhaps
An older head then mine

I would not wish regrets

On such a prodigy, immaculately conceived

Keep your distance, and I’ll keep mine

Till one or other of us has the wit

To learn the fancy footwork that will carry us

Through a lifetime of such unfinished conversations.

Poetry my arse

An excursion into a more lyrical world, brought on by clean-ups, manzanilla and muses.

Lost and Found

I found her

Hidden behind the front row of books

Scraping back layers of words

Carefully blowing the dust off fragments

Of other lives.

She was lurking there, at twenty-something

Among complete collections of Greene

Hunted in Bloomsbury bookshops on lunchtime jaunts

Seed, breed and generation in a row of Chambers dictionaries

One for every thirty-three years of a century passed

Cheek by jowl with Dineen and de Bhaldraithe

And a half-remembered slew

Of darker fictions, a briefing for her own descent

Most poignantly,

In unused tomes on illustration

The silent row of poetry books, unspoken words

Child, girl, woman,

Daughter.

My copies and his twinned.

I wept to find a treasury

Of words and memories,

A brief history

Of who I am

And still am not.

And still not grown

At thirty-three or any other age

But growing yet.

Cathy Dalton

27 July 2013