And now the taste of it, this autumn.
It’s there in the first brown leaves
that scud across the pavements,
the departure of experience
into memory and those other adjustments
I’m having to make, being home
and not really here.
On
the bridge,
love's hope gets locked as if fixing it
could be anything more than a promise
that might well declare its own failure.
This is where we live and what we have
to look out on: the edge of the city
and, beyond it, the lives which seem
to diminish towards the horizon
but nevertheless exist and have been lived.
