Trying to write a poem of explanation
Perhaps there are children in me
only as there are sonnets
in the squid's dark inkwells
I grow tired of having left you,
and go to haunt the window.
Crossing the mullion now,
high up in the sky, a jet leaves
a vapour trail on its journey west;
there are people waiting inside that too,
moving down the map from Ireland,
over the whale-blue canyons
of the mid-Atlantic rift
to the Gulf of St Lawrence,
Boston, New York, Cape May,
dropping toward summer.
My love is up in the air
above the old landing place.
That neighbourhood
where we might have lived:
I have been there, at night,
swimming in the water towers.
