On a park bench, not anywhere,

but here in Dublin, a day in August,

and your man dressed as if

he might be coming away

from a wedding, tie ceremonious,

hair larded flat, trousers pinched

to a rigorous edge. And before I know,

I'm congratulating a get-away-with-you

eighty-six and enduring a history

of all-the-years-ago pen-pushing London life,

Customs, Inland Revenue – job jacked in,

he tells me, when his Mammy died,

and how he was obliged to let her down,

his Hampstead one-and-only … Ah, later

the married one and sex, mustn't think

him any way incapable,

he has been in every sense

a proper man … but faithful

to mother in the end, to mother's memory,

a decent man, who has, he says,

respected women all his life.

Now history's all he's got,

scratch narratives of now and then,

and ah, the terrible price of things, the young.