Thinking of Christopher Brennan

Returning to rooms, through westerlies
tugging at our soiled, distended coats,
one of us pauses thought a moment,
and invokes thought of the other man.

One of us, or both of us, will cough
halfway up the stairs to the small room;
there, the beds and our books await us
as in silent reproach of the past.

And the wood of the stairs will speak low
of our passage back to rooms, will say
that we have paused here, and proceeded on,
and that all acts are just mere echoes.

That we practised poetry, echo;
that we are barely alive, echo.