I am with you, walking,
And we check the day's step count.
We are weaving in the woods,
braiding together paths
of past and future.
Criss-cross trails unfolding
In the midst of wildflowered green.
We are turning corners
Finding not fairies but
ourselves, in familiar places.
It somehow surprises you that
Our dogs are instant best buds.
I'd been certain of that but am
Less sure where we parked the car.
I confidently lead us three times over the same bridge.
We are blessed by a dragonfly,
Enquiring how? Why
This pair would double back,
Reflect so uncertainly in the water.
How tentatively they seek a path.
At times, we are quiet and that's fine.
Knowing we can be quiet together
Feels something like coming home.
Here and there, we let go of little regrets,
Releasing them to the wood,
Or watch them bob away on the brook.
The weight of us disperses
Into a canopy of leafy sunlight.
I begin to know the colour of your bruises
You learn to distrust my sense of direction.
Step count.
Now, we're walking to a bar
to drink some gin, feet in-sync.
Twenty-five years is a long time
to not walk with somebody
And yet, you occupy
a particular space beside me
that perhaps was always yours.
You are wearing silver rings on your fingers
And I can see so much time etched into them
The wear and tear of a life I don't know.
But they're the same silver rings I used to love,
And each ellipse in the silver
Slips something like a hook into me.
I think to feel those rings between my fingers
Would be familiar
As the sight of them on yours.
We walk, your side-eye saying
Things your tongue will not.
The unspoken puzzle
Around which you close yourself
Like a bat.
Sometimes, we're quiet.
And that's fine.
Tracing steps,
We begin to show each other
where our feet have taken us.
You have walked through
marriage and motherhood.
Along an artery of life and loss
I can't quite comprehend, here,
Fixed by the rings on your fingers,
Spooked by the magic of silver.
I'm stuttering, plodding along
With not being a father.
With not being so many things.
With treading repeating circles.
And yet, as I stir your words
into my Tanqueray, and
sip at the story of you,
It tastes like a tonic.
It's not the complex mingling
of love, loss and resentment
I might once have expected.
Instead, it's a deep and clear draught
Of the girl I knew,
And all I am
- All I am -
Is so very proud of you.
Of the woman you've become,
Of the good and bad you've borne
While wearing those same silver rings.
Which are no less precious to me with time.
I am counting the steps
Between our last milestone and this,
As we mosey over an old blue bridge.
Not yet gone far but already
Lifted from the discord of traffic.
You are free to go anywhere
With or without me, yet
You're here with smiling eyes,
That summon a molten silver,
billowing ocean bloom in my body;
An unfathomable desire
To get to the other side of something with you and nothing else
Nothing but your rings between my fingers
And freedom from the past.
Our toes sink into the green verges of each other.
Let the dragonflies watch with envy.
