Blue Irises
for Lauris Edmond
After, appropriately,
several false turnings
and twice overshooting the mark
I was there, on the shorn grass
looking around at the hills
uncertain, suitably too,
which of the freshly turned
patches of dirt embraced
the bodily trace you had left
cold and hard on your bed
in the red-curtained room
in the house over the harbour
and found a pile of new clay
which might might have been it and would do
well enough and against it
set down the blue irises
and thought I would have the last word
for certain this once and it was
the only one spoken for you
were not here and not
as far as the evidence goes
anywhere else I could think of
and looked back once or twice
at the blue fleck against the drab
immensity of clay.
W H Oliver