Derek Wright: ‘Climber’ and ‘All Our Good-Morrows’

Climber

Since a steep winter walk crocked my left knee
the leg’s stopped talking to the rest of me:
nerves, muscles, brain—they hear its pains

but muffled, like the wires are frozen.
Stiff, it braces itself through daily paces,
lets its fellow, its right-leg man and master,

hustle it home with a stick, a step behind,
the sound of one foot walking, one dragged,
grudgingly lies down in tandem; but in sleep

becomes its own limb again,
goes off for holidays on its own,
shins up the Eiger or Matterhorn.

I dreamed, modestly, of conquering Coot-tha
or, fifty years back, Scafell, the Peaks, Lyke Wake.
My leg has other ideas. One night

left-field toenails rip a blizzard through the sheets,
dig a pit in the bed deep enough
to bury us—senses, sinews, mind and all—

under pillows of white, too deep to hear
the cramponed foot kick away compasses,
markers and maps, or to feel winter

creeping like hemlock past my thighs
and everything nerveless, numb, packed in ice.
                                Derek Wright

All Our Good-Morrows

Till we loved we knew not what we did,
wrote Donne of lovers. No whens or thens,
only now, this moment’s world, newer than the last—
like children to whom figures from the past
were characters in story-books, nursery yarns,
not breathing lives with their nows behind them,
hidden where their heirs would find them
staled by history, wiser when gone for good.

The old world’s passionless clocks chimed soon.
What they waited for had already happened.
Hours, centuries, crowded their little room,
days changed hands, reclaimed owners. In the end
time at their table added them to its store
of what lovers did both after and before.

Derek Wright