I shall have to learn to breakfast alone.
No comfort in these solitary dawns.
The children are not born yet, to display
heart-striking likeness to your red-gold hair,
or eyes that I won’t recognise as mine.
Perhaps they’ll keep my emptiness at bay
with daybright clamour, but I doubt; at dawn
I miss you most.

I will let you go, trusting
the otherness that swallows you. The clock runs
a lesson in survival, in the hour
that in winter is blackest, summer most sweet.
Smooth and sleep-warmed, you’ll slip away from me,
pushing down tenderness into its box,
climb into the cab, and turn the engine;
while I nurse my dream-drifting consciousness,
wondering how night’s vulnerability
braces to keep such weight upon the road.

Then drive. I hear you working through the gears,
the big slow wagon grumbling up the hill,
lamps folded in fog or speared by rain. Cold
winter storms swallow you, or spring mornings
echo your jolting progress. Summer
dawns bring hard labour with the harvest straw,
and autumn, wool loads swaying to the mills.
You’re far away now and the road, the day
and all its business claims you.

I could wait
and worry, as some anxious women do:
will you be safe, will you get home tonight,
will you be faithful while you’re out of view?

I could spend lifetimes on such jealous care,
but that’s betrayal; I’ve accepted you.