Tenderly wept the taps,
slipping tears of beer
into his short clasp
as if they knew then
what we know now.

He did not drink, but
the stout fingers made clubs
of the epithets he hurled
randomly as he drove
the men from the bar.

And once gone he locked
the battered black door
through which generations
had passed, and walked
away. A crepuscular

pallid Englishman,
he returned to less daunting hills.
Time called on the clachan,
it warms now only
in term time or when the team play

and yet, the cherry trees
still blossom, the taps
still weep their regular tears,
and lives still too
(but now only every other Sunday).

They’d been in hiding,
in their buff folder,

those dusty X-ray films,
since nineteen-ninety.

Not that I’d been seeking –
no, had I sought such

I risked being unwrought
(or so I thought).

Like the night Ma said,
she said, she did, that I

had been conscious
throughout.

As we were driven to
the American airbase,

I lay across her lap, staring up,
the faded houndstooth

flexing with doubled amber
pulses from the verge

of the night
(or so it seemed).

No, you see I
should have died there,

a vacuum in my heart
fixing me at only three,

right there, upon my mother’s
knee – I shouldn’t be

alive, and yet here I
am, the didn’t-quite-die,

the there-but-for-the-grace-
of-God-go-I, the boy

with the bracketed bones.
These old X-rays ask,

“Are you so very special?”
(or so it seems).