Elegy

I would like to apologise for

the afternoon when, while retrieving

my favourite fold-out stripy chair

from the shed which you organised

so, from outside, the windows were

neatly peopled with spade handles, rollers,

handlebars unlikely ever again to be gripped –

I imagined you dead in order to

compose a premature elegy

                                                though I can guarantee

you would have approved of the part

where I went on about how oil in locks,

on cogs and hinges, dries up,

directing attention to the small things,

the nitty gritty of days that you attend like a surgeon. 

You have greased our way.

It was full of thanks.

                                    But now

it strikes me that this does,

in the manner of stopped watches and clocks,

elegise for real, though

not you, but the me of that moment,

the young dog me, still practising,

still bracketed by all his family.

Another birth shunts us all further from the centre

to an outer edge where we take turns to totter,

soon fall off, a place where

moments weigh double,

a denser gravity slows us

enough for thoughts to take hold and trouble.

Dry runs become the real thing,

though once there was a me

that simultaneously knew but didn’t believe this would happen.

This is an elegy for him.