If I Had Thought

I 

If I had thought you would have gone so imperceptibly

so almost-without-my-knowing

I might have listened to your fluted love, the touterelles

      in the orange grove, more intently

I would have dipped more easily in your island streams

savouring the cool ripple of your fingers on my skin;

I would have slept late into an afternoon, to wake

to the banter and squawking of aigrettes mating 

      In a stand of blue mangroves

oblivious of this “progress” thing about to happen;

I would have painted immortally

children bathing, swathed in clear rain coming

down over La Sorcière.

But now the sun dips into an evening

red with the dust of the trades. And I note

that we have traded the soft tenor of touterelles,

the pure pleasure of rain on a child’s skin, for this!