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.
