Living – living takes you away from sitting (Louise Gluck Twilight)
I need to be going somewhere
to break out of antipathy, to resist.
So we pack the car, lock up our house
stop to buy tomorrow’s breakfast on the way.
Before we eat together, we fill the room
with the clatter of pans, recalibrate
to the tumbling play of six cousins.
There are my sister’s girls, my brother’s boy.
We three feel it, how January
became this heavy month of leaving
Brian is in Alberta tonight, Aidan, John.
Peter’s talking Perth again for February.
Later we sit in the conservatory talking
over pots of tea Whose round is it?
Snow falls on the woods opposite
and I see we have become a snow globe
our quarter family tableau, frozen,
teapot raised, laughing.