I.

Your mother walks light as an empty creel

Unlearning the intimate nudge and pull



Your trussed-up weight of seed-flesh and bone-curd

Had insisted on. That evicted world



Contracts round its history, its scar.

Doomsday struck when your collapsed sphere



Extinguished itself in our atmosphere,

Your mother heavy with the lightness in her.



II.



For six months you stayed cartographer

Charting my friend from husband towards father.



He guessed a globe behind your steady mound.

Then the pole fell, shooting star, into the ground.



III.



On lonely journeys I think of it all,

Birth of death, exhumation for burial;



A wreath of small clothes, a memorial pram

And parents reaching for a phantom limb.



I drive by remote control on this bare road

Under a drizzling sky, a circling rock.



Past mountain fields full to the brim with cloud.

White waves riding home on a wintry lough.