We Are Always Too Late

(Café in Soho, London, 1955 by Willy Ronis, 1910-2009,
French photographer)

The poet recalls her role in the drama of a romance — her thoughts trace what was and what should have been.

WE ARE ALWAYS TOO LATE

Memory
Is in two parts.

First the re-visiting:

the way even now I can see
those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.

It is New England, breakfast time, winter. Behind her,
outside the picture window, is
a stand of white pines.

New snow falls and the old,
losing its balance in the branches,
showers down,
adding fractions to it. Then

The re-enactment. Always that.
I am getting up, pushing away
coffee. Always I am going towards her.

The flush and scald is
to her forehead now, and back down to her neck.

I raise one hand. I am pointing to
those trees, I am showing her our need for these
beautiful upstagings of
what we suffer by
what survives. And she never even sees me.

~ Eavan Boland, born in 1944, Irish poet