Memory
Is in two parts.
First the re-visiting:
the way even now I can see
those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.
It is New England, breakfast time, winter. Behind her,
outside the picture window, is
a stand of white pines.
New snow falls and the old,
losing its balance in the branches,
showers down,
adding fractions to it. Then
The re-enactment. Always that.
I am getting up, pushing away
coffee. Always I am going towards her.
The flush and scald is
to her forehead now, and back down to her neck.
I raise one hand. I am pointing to
those trees, I am showing her our need for these
beautiful upstagings of
what we suffer by
what survives. And she never even sees me.
Eavan Boland
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/we-are-always-too-late/
