Candradasa

            That time we walked up to Banagher Dam

            competing all the way:

            the shocked, stern, physical silence,

            and the miraculous heat,

            and our thumping hearts

            when we got to the top.

            I fell asleep on the grass.

            When I woke you convinced me

            about eating apples including the core,

            though already a little wary of me;

            so it felt like I was being taught,

            not the old mutual sharing of ways.

            (A few years later, a man in Wales

            tells me birds won’t eat an apple’s pips

            as they contain some tiny trace of cyanide.

            He’d stopped himself on hearing this

            and, glad of the excuse, I found

            it made a lot of sense to me.)

            But back at the dam it’s getting late.

            We’re starting down, lighter between us

            as we come near the moss-wood,

            fern-breaks, soft-crumble sides

            falling away to the burn beneath;

            we cross a bridge – and run:

            Whooping, barking, down on all-fours,

            shuttling between trees like men

            formed in a certain kind of light

            growing supple as deer,

            while overhead a tawny sky,

            and underfoot the fawny ground.

            Scampering the wounding way

            of a young forest’s hollows: trip-

            humps and leaf-fills and rotting trunk-cuts;

            ducking in and out of vision

            like the lost patrol in a film

            of a far-off jungle war.

            A wreathing passage then, the yield

            of branches; smooth our stooping,

            sharp our awareness of the other,

            even when invisible. We’d stop,

            dead but for the beat in the ears –

            then strain, catch sound, and whoop again

            And run again, and harry and chase

            and laugh respectful; maintaining reserve –

            then suddenly veering over new paths

            won together through the wood: crisscrossing

            in front, behind each other,

            never getting in the way.

            Till eventually we emerge –

            glorious and nakedly undefiant –

            to collapse sweating, roaring with blood,

            silent again in a heap of grasses

            piled dry beside the stile

            close to where we’d left the car.