Return Journey

By: Eoin Flannery

When we meet again –

though not apart that

long –

you are thinner.

It is as if anxiety has peeled

back layers, shaved years,

with each stressed heartbeat

back to here.

Like a river looking

for its source,

your eyes cannot settle,

they turn

against the strange currents

of the familiar.

Too many hands try to hold

yours in place,

they reach out

to cradle your fear.

Weeks later, leaving the city,

heading south, I remember

a sweltering riverbank and can

feel the cool folds

of a yellow dress.

You are held in a photograph

under the shade of a linden

tree, and there are motes of reflected

river light eclipsing my memory.

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Eóin Flannery is a writer and critic based in Limerick, Ireland, where he is Associate Professor of English Literature at Mary Immaculate College. He has published 12 books of literary and cultural criticism. His poetry has appeared in The Galway Review; Prairie Home Magazine and Vita and the Woolf Literary and Arts Journal, and is forthcoming in The City View; The Red Ogre Review; Inkfish Magazine and The Hog River Press. He is working on a collection of poems entitled, Unshadow.

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