I have no idea what we talked about
that midsummer bank holiday evening
at the corner of the Leinster Road,
two students circling each other
by the side wall of Rathmines library
and jabbering on as if our lives depended
on it. We didn’t know each other then,
and a lifetime later, as I watch you
in the garden from this bedroom window,
I’m only too aware that we still don’t.
This, though, was where it all began,
among the sun-specked leaves and shadows
of the Leinster Road, that long journey
towards an accommodation destined to be
always inscrutable, if no longer unfamiliar.
