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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.