Love and Remembrance
Each breath is prelude to another,
worlds supposing other worlds—
so luck runs through the cards,
through each life good or bad:
that is our belief.
Life made or lost
in chance selecting chance,
loss and triumph dizzy in the dice,
perhaps the weather will appease,
stars counted one by one.
Beyond the yews
a clutter of stones, a measure of names
and proved departures
and the house sunk deep into the hill,
more hill than house.
Centuries of settled life
trans fixed in oak and render: the house frame swings,
wrung, and plank floors bend to right themselves
within a conch-twist equilibrium.
We are visitors here, life upon life.
The graves are scenery now, troubled sky
tumbling towards tomorrow, herringbone foliage
and the road ahead.
Why do I feel I am waiting to be born,
a shadow lifting free to perfect summer?
Cold clans circle, and breathless years
insist on recognition,
looped magnet lights that mark the poles.
The mind seeks out the moody edge,
the universe adjusted to caught time.
I waited for you, a remembered place. You were late
the way rains are late in a dry country.
Perhaps time is shaped by memory,
a simple consequence of weather,
death without judgment, fire, forgiveness.
We deserved a life, a sky love lit,
a life we chose for the sacrifices made,
not this, all this talk of spirits
and a preference for the undertow.
All must rise to meet us, part and counterpart.
Once, we stood at the centre of the sun,
pitied moonlight for its lesser art,
worlds going under like swimmers in a cramp.
We stand now,
bewildered in this witness.
How shall we define the past, this waiting
pitched perfectly to resonant abstractions?
The purity of shadow throws deeper shadow still,
where time flays, and ghosts
walk fearless in the flawed daylight.
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