Your beard, though grown long and matted,
retained its ginger streaks.
Visiting after the second stroke
I’d become used to your silence:
a mind withdrawing, seeking
in the still life of washing up, some pattern.
Going without saying.
Yet we talked more easily then
in that drab assessment unit.
Our currency whatever fragments
came to mind: random Italian,
the Ministry of Food, buses –
Midland Red and the Outer Circle.
In glimpses from a splintered mirror,
side by side my unasked questions.
Had there been no qualms
about that no-helmet nine-year-old
riding pillion on your Lambretta?
I gripped tightly as I could.
In later years, as high summer dawns broke,
did you return to bed
after dropping me to ring birds in the marshes?
Reductio ad mediocritatem:
why, on your Vienna Garrison pass,
had you jotted that?
And how heavy had that projector been?
Ferried home, and followed
by reels in foot-wide storage cans
to show, when the film was threaded,
Far From The Madding Crowd
on our front room wall.
You were surprised I knew of your uncle,
him in the Irish Post Office:
ever the sceptical, “I doubt it”.
Yes, there were cracks in the varnish:
a suspicion of nurses, counted
two by two on fingers.
The insistence that doors be left open -
and in your pyjama pocket, fifty pence for phone call -
to be always sure of escape.
Each thin-socked, shuffled step placed
painstakingly before the next.
Going without saying.
Further on. You’re sucking tea through a straw,
head so stooped that I must crouch
to meet your eyes.
Few words. My hands clasp yours,
by thickened nails the hold’s returned.
I kiss your freckled crown,
the hair on tissue paper skin cropped close.
Yesterday there was no grip left.
Pupils rolled under lids,
your eyes dry.
Full shaved again after thirty years
I see revealed in skeletal cheeks,
revenant, your own father’s face.
Come without knocking.
You always said the darkest hour
comes just before the dawn.
Our moon now is a clipped nail -
last thing to stop growing –
and that sky finger of five red lights
splits the black horizon
of goodbye, tears gathering
at the crossroads of ten to four.
No more debate turning
on the sixpence of a word’s interpretation.
Nothing would be a lesson
if it didn’t come too late.
As morning breaks you’re laid flat,
comfortable for first time in weeks.
Gone without saying.
