The perpetual visitor

Frankie McMillan

To sleep in this house
requires a mountaineering

mood, a liking for tall
nursery wardrobes, plaster

ceilings, the crevices picked
out by a pocket torch. I bring

gifts: a suitcase of seagulls
white linen from Ireland.

Come upstairs, the ancestors
call. I begin to sleep more.

Nothing is forever
yet the child who comes

in the dark, carrying an apple
a comb for my thinning hair

sings in a voice that can strip
paper from wall, can wind

sheets of Egyptian cotton
as surely as the bed holds

a memory of this; your limbs
the faint fury of wooden slats.