The Coastguard’s Cottage
Tu non ricordi la casa dei doganieri
sul rialzo a strapiombo sulla scogliera
– Montale
We never forgot the coastguard’s cottage
out on the tip of Cranfield Point.
Still no one lives there; maybe it’s waiting
for us to make up our minds and move in?
The plans we had the day we drove out!
Or, rather, the plans I had that day.
‘To think it’s for sale,’
I said – and you:
‘How would the children get to school?
And when they have gone, what will we do?’
The sea has thrown foam at its old walls for years,
years spent watching – or, rather,
not watching – our children grow
(and, one by one, our parents die – yours,
as we guessed, the last to go).
Still no one lives here! Whoever once did
played cards – and dice.
Through the window I see someone’s last throw!
And there’s his last hand, the one he does
not, in the end, have to show…
(They must also have read:
on a high empty shelf, a great silver A
with (bottom right) a matching Z;
they left the heavy bookends
when they packed the books away.)
We would have had a garden
– with a drop to the rocks below! –
some space at long last for the children,
instead of the tiny, cluttered yard in
which kitten and pup – and they – had to grow.
Today the wind spins a plastic compass
– a wonder it never snatched it away! –
lying how long since what
bad-tempered day
a child threw it down on the grass?
We never forgot the coastguard’s cottage
out on the tip of Cranfield Point.
‘I doubt,’ you said, ‘we ever will.
I wonder if the house itself
isn’t waiting for us still?’