Robert Browning breathed an hour in our house today.
I was reading his poems loudly when I heard his spirit say,
‘Close down your fusty office. There is naught in here to keep
an adult’s full attention. Come outside, where there are sheep,
where magpies mime and mock us, where fat rabbits hide in dunes
and foxes follow secret trails. Come outside and hear the tunes
the lorry wheels go chirping as they stress the cobblestones.’

‘Live your LOVE!’ he added. ‘When I had life, my hobbled bones
were happiest those times I dared. When I was thirty-four,
my dearest (six years senior) made a pact with me: we swore
to live the years we’d somehow got, no matter long or short.
I bid you, lad, to do the same. It will na’ help to snort
and say that you’re too busy, too august. That’s juvenile.’

‘Thanks for reading,’ he appended. I was silent for a while
then I kicked the office door shut, slammed it hard and something broke.
In the hall I sought my rainwear. I was surprised to find a cloak
on the jacket’s rightful peg, I took it down, and wrapped myself
in old, soft-coloured plaids. I also freed the cloakroom shelf
of leather gloves I didn’t recognise. Had they been left for me?

My lethargy recalled me: ‘Don’t exert yourself and be
inveigled into going out. Stay sitting on your pride.
You expect work’s enough to see you out. Your oh-so-precious hide,
for years unhindered in its old and hibernating habit,
objects to trips to seek the fox, to look in on the rabbit.
You rattle sabres in imagined wars, and think you look for stars.’

‘Leave unknown loves to Cupid. Leave walkabouts to Mars.
Life’s not been kind to you, this week, nor even this whole year.
You fantasise heroic deeds? Your ‘actions’ don’t come near!
Ebenezer’s role is one that fits you better than does this antique cape
that you imagine gives you style. In fact its woollens drape
you in the guise of a forlorn don. Sit. Rest your bones awhile.’

This nagging doubter, an inner self, the one that acts so mild,
almost brought me down. I would have sat, but right then my cat
bristled down the hall and through the door. With my cloak but with no hat
I hastened after her. My steps guided (I had the notion)
by something today more purposeful than lazy Brownian motion,
I almost cantered, approaching the sea. My cat stood already there,
conversing, I’d swear, with a darkling lady whose abundant hair
blew away all doubts I’d ever had. I felt elated in its breeze
when I heard her friendly call: we both spoke Portuguese.

My lady (yes, she is now that) and I both like the cloak.
On darkling evenings, in what is now our home, I hang it up and stoke
the fire and think my reading caused that phantom ‘Live Your Love.’
I see ‘our’ Maine cat smile at me from her perch on Robert’s gloves.