The Ropemaker

The Cost of Living

For Robin

Go then, adventurer, on your vivid journey,

Though once again, of course, I cannot join you—

That is as certain as your happy ending.

The one-armed captain in the pirate harbor

Would know me in an instant for a Jonah.

No gnome would ever speak with me for witness,

And so let slip the spell-dissolving answer

Before you’d even heard the sacred riddle.

I, as it happens, know it from my reading,

But the blind queen would ask it in a language

Not in the syllabus of my old college,

But which your loved, illiterate nanny taught you.

No, I will stay at home and keep things going,

Conduct the altercation with the builders,

Hoe the allotment, fix the carburetor.

I’m genuinely happier with such dealings;

It isn’t merely that they pass the seasons

Until I hear your footstep on the threshold.

Then I will sit and listen to your story

With a complacently benign amazement,

Believing it because it’s you that tell it.

And when you’ve done, and I have asked my questions,

I for the umpteenth time on such homecomings

Will say what’s happened to the cost of living.