Into Your Office

Long after you had died,

I opened your leather brief case

to find the smells of your office:

pipe smoke, cigarette smoke, pencil parings,

paper, manila envelopes still inside.

Suddenly, vividly, I was eight or nine,

asking if I can come in,

sit quietly in the heater’s heat,

in the pipe smoke,

in the cosiness beside your table.

‘If you promise to be quiet.’

‘I won’t say a word. I’ll be very quiet.’

And I’d sit on the stool

in the heater’s heat and the pipe smoke

and the cigarette smoke,

beneath the bare tungsten bulb

and it’s smell of burning dust,

under the pine-wood ceiling,

cosy beside your table,

beside you, happy.

Until, of course, I couldn’t keep it going,

had to talk, and shift,

pare the pencils.

That was that,

probably no more than minutes later,

I was ejected.

And then, suddenly,

all those years after your death,

like a genie from your brief case:

your office,

you, my love for you;

and the incursion of those smells into my adulthood,

my home in Dublin;

the shock of something real not illusory

as though your memory was taking form.