As It Was

 As It Was

 

We spent all our yesterdays in love of love

driving up to toll booths and tossing out coin

to cross on chain linked stay cabled bridges,

shackles over Severn and now Severn’s two,

chucked surplus change into change buckets,

well, there should be change, change is good,

but now here I am arrived and here I'll shiver

lost looking above love’s bottomless river

yours forevermore - for you said that once

I think - told to most of what was left of him.

Your yearning for as it was but what was it

that once was swept sleep’s creeping caves

of sandy rust, left streaky dust on our faces

of slumped slumbered spans, came too late

to find passage is free at barred toll gates.

You clutched us then but can no longer hold,

drove all this way to find a blasted shelterbelt

just echoed the fragments of a feeling you felt

tossed back among maps in my box of gloves.