Sometimes it’s like coming home. Before you cross the threshold
the dogs are already brushing aside the years of absence
with their tails. You can stroke their shaggy
old table-top again, the pimply surface of the dear
calibrated wall a map of dates and names
you were measured by in childhood, longing
to keep on growing higher into it with every line.
That’s how you measure with a metre: standing against
a solid bulwark of paper, dates and names, and faith
in the wall you can always run up to
out of the bitter rain, back beneath the gutter of rhyme.
And sometimes it’s like fate wanting to cut off
your intention with a caesura or cast it into another
poem, where there’s no more home or family.



Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones