// We bear what keeps us in mind: the friend who drove the black miles through, the daughter practised in arriving who came in time to carry you. Your biro lay beside the bed, gifts and garden jobs scored through, and one small plan to end the pain made, made again, but never used. The night you left, the shock was seismic, I gripped the bed to bide the room. Small white birds rose fingertip-high through the strange machinery of gloom. There you were atop the rowan waving down at me, as if to say (Don’t fash, hen, it’s only dreaming.) So I dreamed a softer place. Come by kelp, come by pine, come by the cold Fife tide. If the water will not give you, I will dream you to my side. Come by hazel, come by brine, come whatever shape you’re in. If I cannae dream you home I’ll dream the tide back in. There was the hill, the tangled briars knuckled into loops and curls, the arch we ducked beneath together where the bottle-smashers go. We made a vow there in the muck to parley terror out of hiding, you, in the future I imagined me, in the past you left behind Come by kelp, come by pine, come by the cold Fife tide. If the water will not give you, (I will dream you to my side.) Come by hazel, come by brine come whatever shape you’re in If I cannae dream you home I’ll dream the tide back in The sea grew still as sorrow, a cold paragraph of blue, the same horizon in my kitchen that our loft once woke up to. You swam eight miles into the bay, I would not let the current win. Sent strong arms to fetch you home, draped you in kelp and salt-stiff linen Then the dog was roped behind a car, wheels turning, pulling him behind. So I dreamed myself between them: leap and cut, leap and cut, in time. And the poor beast turned to comfort me, as dream-beasts sometimes do: "Don’t be stupid. Those aren’t drownings." You’ve mistaken what you knew. Come by hazel, come by brine, (come whatever shape you’re in.) (If I cannae dream you home--) I’ll dream, I'll dream... So seep your head beneath the water. I’ll bear what keeps us in mind. You go swimming with the tide, Mam. I’ll breathe what’s left of mine.
