For Matthew
Binoculars cut off the sky and tilt
The green sea like a page; I sit and stare
Watching as if for meaning to appear.
'There!' you say, but it's too hard for me:
The uncoordinated sea yields only
Patches of peacock blue, of wandering turquoise,
Cliff-shadow, cloud-shadow, shoal-shadow; nothing that stays.
If only, you say, we had come on some calm evening:
Then in a mirror sea the dolphins barrel,
Leaping in sport. You want me so to see them.
I look again. Was that a fin, that curve?
Nothing for sure. We give up, take the path
Above the high cliffs in the summer wind.
You honour with their names the near at hand:
Purple moor-grass, vetch, the sprinkled gold
Of lady's bedstraw, sea-blue stars of squill.
I taught you once, a little: now you know
Far more than I did then, and I have been
Too much apart from this: I had forgotten
Even the small brown gatekeeper, that lover
Of warm light and the lilac bramble-flower.
No, I could teach you nothing now, unless
A never-disappointedness, to fill
So many days between the dolphin days:
A fallback from the rare miraculous
To earth, and sky, and sunlight on the gorse.
