There is an afternoon where all the afternoons
Accumulate, like interest, you might say.
Though the account has been suspended,
So that no reports or dividends are issued
Quarterly or annually or ever.
If as it were you had that kind of money,
What would such a sum secure? But even though
It’s you who ask, one really couldn’t say.
It would depend on all things being equal,
On the bourse from which no traveller returns,
And on the sentiment prevailing on the day.
It could be nothing. It could be
Of merely sentimental value, and of that
Only you are competent to judge.
You see the difficulty, then? And yet
Were you to press now, were you to insist?
One does not care to speculate.
The smell of rain before it falls, perhaps,
Or burning leaves when there is fire
But no smoke, a kind of poetry, you might say,
Arriving neither late nor soon,
Of interest in an abstract kind of way,
Since nothing comes of it. But now
As you must also be aware, the clock’s
Against us. Let us say good afternoon.
Sean O’Brien’s 10th book of poems, It Says Here (Picador), was recently published. His Collected Poems (Picador) was published in 2012. He is professor of creative writing at Newcastle University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
