Breakfast with Michael Longley
River and Fountain
From beyond the window October’s memory
of what summer might have been poured in, and there
was Billie singing God Bless the Child, there was
sun through the apple juice, dazzling the table.
There was Hart Crane, there was Wallace Stevens,
time murmuring and the toast crumbling,
Kunitz, Masefield, Stevens, talk of poets who sang
with you: Heaney, there was Mahon, Muldoon,
the dance of a new poem made, poems
flowing from Pee Wee Russell’s clarinet,
and you said – and the coffee was my witness –
prose is a river, poetry a fountain,
and I knew that because you’d written it, because
I’d long had the text in my head and by heart,
but to hear you say it. To hear you say it…
the table white, silver, a Ghost Orchid there,
Fats Waller’s Honeysuckle Rose. And then it rained,
but Billie sang I’ll find you in the morning sun,
so Autumn resumed, playing still-bright notes that
fell through harvest light, prisms in every one.