High Force

Seven years have passed, seven and a half
since we last parked up beside the white hotel—
in a hire car, then—and holding hands descended
the steep path lined with pale birches
into the gorge, neither of us knowing
whether passing families in bright waterproofs
did or didn’t presage our future together.

Love was molten, blazing. Amazing we’d left
the rented room long enough for this,
clothed and everything, separately scarfed, in search
of backdrops to pose against, or rough
drafts with which to gauge one another
as the words swam and swapped and shook themselves
like dogs coming out of the river.

The fosse that day, after weeks of rain,
brimmed and foamed and hid the Whin Sill
and its usual zagged path in a pounding-down
of polar-bear spume, ropy and rippling
but somehow standing still through sheer
insistence, sheer abundance. This was
infinity’s house, house of perpetual motion—

froth falling forever, forever self-
renewing, is what we thought we were, I was,
underneath it all: a metaphor
whose issuing-forth would never end, who would
not stand like this in seven years’ time
grown softer and scareder even than the whin,
let alone the water it thrums beneath.

Even writing this, I can’t see how,
I want to laugh, these images rivering through me
and on into you could ever end,
nor High Force continue falling
down the lightning-bolt course it likes,
or even being water, in our absence—
though it will, and it does, and it’s doing so still.