'Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn't he?' said the Dean. 'His son's here now.'Death-suited, visitant,
I nod. 'And
You keep in touch with-' Or remember
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still
We used to stand before that desk, to give'Our version' of 'these incidents last night'?
I try the door of where I used to live:
Locked.
The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes.
I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges
Slowly from view.
But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been
In '43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this
At nineteen, twenty?
Was he that
High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing
With Cartwright who was killed?
Well, it just
How much . . .
How little . . .
Yawning,
I supposeI fell asleep, waking at the
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked
The platform to its end to see the
Joining and parting lines reflect a
Unhindered moon.
To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others.
Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken
Of what he wanted, and been
Of . . .
No, that's not the difference: rather,
Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution.
Where do
Innate assumptions come from?
Not from
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors.
They're more a
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we've
And how we got it; looked back on, they
Like sand-clouds, thick and close,
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son's harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
