Michaelmas '06

For those I met and delved so briefly into
I have many fine names, many “beloved”s and
“light of my life”s, which are true names if
also untrue, the light being temporary as flintspark
and the beloving only possible during the term of proximity

-- still I think of you all as lovers I have known, male female
and other, other being the designation for you who exceeded
such silly limits and flew burning past them like terrible birds in my mind,
somehow modest all the while. You fly there still, storming
up and down the aisles of books, fluttering ominously the pages of
my fading recollections, overturning them suddenly yet
vanishing when I raise my head.

I hold here a photograph, taken in Wales, and here, in London,
and this oh my treasure is of you, all my many loves, in
these skimming watercraft, myself once at the helm, still
captured in my unbelieving giddiness that you could just then
regard me as I did you, could love me past that silly damn hat,
perched on my head like the lid of
a jar (bursting with hair).

These things, these objects of love and memory I hold
greedily, miserly, amassing and caressing them, crooning night
-time runes and archaic words of summoning,

I cannot accept that this life was in the past, that it, pinpointed,
will never up itself from its Then to walk alongside me in
the constant Now, that the fire of one Guy Fawkes Day
lights only an ancient face in an ancient photograph --

still I look for its flash.