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in
New & Selected (1981 - 2009), Time Between Tides,
Rockingham Press,
ISBN 978-1-9049513-3-2
Helen Thomas in Epping
Forest
A
sound pushed like paper under a door
was
all that you left of yourself for me,
unmaking
the shape of us. While you saw your way,
the
leafless window promised me nothing
in
its changing tone-songs, Easter
after
Easter already written, imagined
through
the fogged silence of woodland,
its
ally in a conspiracy of short days.
And
I've had to live with that prophecy,
body
of a solitary alive
in
a rain that has once too often slushed
memory
seeking a dusk poem
in
the prosaic glare of grey light.
All
this remains in the knowledge of winds
that
still blow now and then over the place
making
me a ghost there. In the morning
hereafter
there's a dress on a bed
and
a naked silhouette in white light
by
the window as if it happened yesterday
when
the snow's stillness brought us together,
the
iambics of you walking away
evoking
the last sounds we made of love.
Seán Street
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