Encore

for Ciarán

A matter of weeks, maybe months.

You wake another morning to the toll

of those words, wondering about the point

of going on.

A path tickled by light

and the striped shadows of branches

rolling over you. Different-coloured doors.

A man holding a woman’s hand a moment

after they’ve said, ‘Goodbye.’

Boats on dry land under covers stretched

tight as canvasses. A pair of swans ruddering

the current where a green rope flows

from a tractor tyre; and what children howled

on its upward arc? Passing the library, faces

of students at desks surprise you into a nod.

A tin whistler in an alley. The weight you add

to the palm of a woman with a coin on her glove,

before screams rising off the Ferris Wheel

call for a smile.

Every corner you turn, people

taking the time to tell you, ‘Thanks a million.’

Slates after rain set horses snorting in the stalls

of your childhood; the lives you’ve passed through,

and the thousands through you. On a bridge

corked with moss, flowers with flimsy stems

nodding in the breeze –

time to return, maybe tend to your rosebushes.

It’s not too late to coax them back to being.

Evan Costigan won the 2012 Francis Ledwidge Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 Hennessy Literary Awards. He received a poetry bursary from Kildare County Council arts office in 2012.