Wrecking

Here, in Sligo, the yellow whin
punctuates mountain sheets of shale;
a churning sky is flapping full of wind -
the same that smashed Armada's Spanish sails.

Appropriate coast for thoughts of foundering:
your shipwrecked marriage, an aftermath of drowning
in that roomy house where family photographs
reveal a fuller past through present griefs.

Where you alone survive like sea-lost Ishmael
warning me with wounds and tales of tears.
You keep a lighthouse now, a beam to marshal
my own dangerous drift with guiding steers.

So when she phones me here in Ireland
I warm again to the shock of her voice,
defying the vast armadas we will face
in distant prospect of wave-torn England.