I forgive you for everything
you said, I forgive you
for being this way.
Our government is an old, dying tree
in our garden. We always thought
when our families were drunk
and we were far away
how good it would be to mingle histories
just because it is so sweet
to feel the night, and sway
into sleep, early, without the other
who would stay.

There is the revolution of the sun
coming - we realise again, at the call
of countless saviours - we read the papers,
we know it's here
and there are things to do. By day,
you are out, amid fields, amongst classes,
I am battling with figures and language, with returning
a single email. You told me the story
of precious time, the story your father was breathing
in the way he told it. I had come in from the night,
after time with a soft bird hidden in the night boughs.

I have not yet touched you. You remain as distant
as mist and cloud in the middle of the Yorkshire moors
when I am there, resting on limestone. You are closer
than coldness that reaches through
whatever fabrics they might manufacture,
in the old textile mills, in the old Yorkshire towns.
You form a layer surrounding me
without attributes, apart from the shape
issuing from your name, which seems to me eternal.
Your smile, hid beneath the window
all these years.

God forbid I should ever think I have discovered you,
as if I could think I discovered the warmth of the sun.
As if one smile were similar to another,
and one kiss the knot of golden dawn.
And let my pictures plummet down to easiness
for all the hard work knowing I have done
enough to ease your mind in pure blind simpleness
knowing as if knowing's just begun.

Let me end this with what is beyond us,
with one hand each holding
and the other, free to reach, reaching
to grasp the shape a lover has.