A weight is lifted as we look at each other

You, in your brilliant femininity,

Me in my thorough-going dreariness of manner.

I thought love was going to sustain me forever

But it turned out to be a feather in a summer breeze,

The loss of something that I barely knew I had,

Left me bereft upon a far-shore and sad,

And so the door into the rose garden finally closed

And Brideshead never was Revisited

And I saw what was really always there

The denial of the light in the frost-whitened air

The explosive extraordinary everyday removal

Of the comfortable unhappiness of fading away

Randomness acclimatised to mood can turn me stern or rude,

Suited to the faraway genetics of my orphan father and my settled

Mother, deeply-embedded patterns of influence that I cannot evade,

This side of the grave, the fight against an unwanted inheritance:

Blessed by woman, cursed by the sea and moon....