The sea's long wet mouth opens, swallows our ageing forms, rolling us into the shallows, and I am lying in a cold delectable stream that brrs down the Slieve Mish thirty plangent decades earlier, bathing with her in six inches of rippling water, supple, hopeful, rapt. Bodies laden with the scripture of those years, our horizons smaller, we gauged the sea's cold, wind brushing nipples when we shed our clothes before water's rushing shivery promise stroked our withered sex. Challenged, I plunged my decrepitude under the next wave. Other familiars trigger me: a fret of smoke, a smirr of rain.

Awake at the witching hour again, my preference for nightfall's quietude picked to the bone, I pad past all the familiar faces staring at me. My porch light above abandoned old sports gear reminds me it's on the blink. Cloud blankets the moon. The faint outlines of our barn where guests from afar met to celebrate my 50th, staged creatively by her, loom, an apparition. Soon after my daily walk, thoughts a welter including wondering which of us would die first, we learned of her diagnosis. I never wanted to imagine aftermath's cruelty, the weird havoc of guilt. Although I increasingly forget things, grief can't be forgotten like the lightning bolt of rage.

Blood zinging through my veins, I used to jump from the water tank, jarring my bones, investing in future pain, feet throbbing now on those walks. I am expert at brewing tea then sitting for an hour gazing through glass, as silent as a Rodin sculpture. Vaguely ironic about loss, shielded by whimsy, I grieve. The dead, those daydream phantasms, their voices' echoes, quicken me again. I breathe everything: the mopoke's call for a mate, warm night air conveying the scent of matted leaves where various pets met their ends, even this flickering porch light. I'll wobble up the ladder for that. Have I forgotten more than I remember yet?

As the moon waits in shadow, mosquitoes thirsting for my thinned blood, we share a jumper for a towel on tide-washed sand recalling wildflowers by that sublime breathtaking stream when early weak sunlight flirted with us, world wanderers before belonging, securing our moorings. Freeing myself from this cage of bones girdling the forest of my heart I spring backwards to the top of our water tank, legs straightening, a sprite performing in a grainy film played in reverse. Darling children dare me in what sounds like Pig Latin. In solitude I watch the moon sail free. Surely I won't forget this?