I
Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life
Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse
Of a sawn down tree, I imagine them
In summer season, as it must have been,
And the place, it dawns on me,
Could have been Grove Hill before the oaks were cut,
Where I'd often stand with them on airy Sundays
Shin-deep in hilltop bluebells, looking out
At Magherafelt's four spires in the distance.
Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation
About a love that's proved by steady gazing
Not at each other but in the same direction.
II
Quercus, the oak. And Quaerite, Seek ye.
Among green leaves and acorns in mosaic
(Our college arms surmounted by columba,
Dove of the church, of Derry's sainted grove)
The footworn motto stayed indelible:
Seek ye first the Kingdom … Fair and square
I stood on in the Junior House hallway
A grey eye will look back
Seeing them as a couple, I now see,
For the first time, all the more together
For having had to turn and walk away, as close
In the leaving (or closer) as in the getting.
III
It's winter at the seaside where they've gone
For the wedding meal. And I am at the table,
Uninvited, ineluctable.
A skirl of gulls. A smell of cooking fish.
Plump dormant silver. Stranded silence. Tears.
Their bibbed waitress unlids a clinking dish
And leaves them to it, under chandeliers.
And to all the anniversaries of this
They are not ever going to observe
Or mention even in the years to come.
And now the man who drove them here will drive
Them back, and by evening we'll be home.
IV
Were I to have embraced him anywhere
It would have been on the riverbank
That summer before college, him in his prime,
Me at the time not thinking how he must
Keep coming with me because I'd soon be leaving.
That should have been the first, but it didn't happen.
The second did, at New Ferry one night
When he was very drunk and needed help
To do up trouser buttons. And the third
Was on the landing during his last week,
Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm
Taking the webby weight of his underarm.
V
It took a grandson to do it properly,
To rush him in the armchair
With a snatch raid on his neck,
Proving him thus vulnerable to delight,
Coming as great proofs often come
Of a sudden, one-off, then the steady dawning
Of whatever erat demonstrandum.
Just as a moment back a son's three tries
At an embrace in Elysium
Swam up into my very arms, and in and out
Of the Latin stem itself, the phantom
Verus that has slipped from 'very'.
