Clock time is our bank manager, tax collector, police inspector; this inner time is our wife. -- J. B. Priestly, Man and Time

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
--Derek Walcott

Clare: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.

Clare: It's hard being left behind. -- from the Prologue