Linger Awhile

25 Detective Inspector Hunter

3 February 2004. I don’t read much poetry any more but there are some poems that I go back to. There’s one by Yeats that’s certainly short enough to stay in my memory but I never get it exactly right and I have to turn to the page in his Collected Poems where the bookmark is:

MEMORY

One had a lovely face,

And two or three had charm,

But charm and face were in vain

Because the mountain grass

Cannot but keep the form

Where the mountain hare has lain.

The form where the hare slept is emptiness in the shape of the hare. Last night I dreamt that Rose Harland came to my bed. I was lying on my side and she shaped herself to my back and pressed herself against me. In the dream I woke up and said, ‘What?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, ‘I didn’t mean to wake you, I only wanted to get warm.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said as I woke up out of the dream. I put my hand where she’d been but her side of the bed was cold.