Yesterday

Yesterday, a song upon the radio
called into memory
a crisp October Sunday morning
when after we,
both twenty-somethings then,
awoke and breakfasted,
you jacketed yourself in tweeds
against the chill outside,
and pulled your floppy hat around
your hair into a flannel crown,
put on your slender-fingered black
kid gloves
and wimpled up your face within a scarf
that framed your chin and mouth
(I said you looked just like a fetching nun),
to come with me, adventure bound,
to browse, togethering,
the Portobello Market stalls --

my goal to spy
what small antiques might sit well on
my mantle piece or warm my living room.

And I recall
how you began a tethering of me
just as we reached the doorway at
the bottom of my stairs  
by clasping lusciously my arm,
encircling it with yours,
before you shoulder nudged me forwards
towards the barrowed fray;

and that
you sang to me a walking song
and fell with easy grace
into the rhythm of my step,
in matchless match of gait to gait;
and most of all the thought of how
once middled in the bustling place,
amidst the trinkets and the carts
the tables spread with bolts of colored cloth,
the shop shelves filled with oranges and nuts
the Autumn air ashimmer with the barkers’ cries,
you turned to steal a hurley-burlied kiss from me

I came to know
within that spinning then and there,
the center of my younger years was you.