This Life

After the endless journey in airless heat
you emerge at last from the underground
and here at the newsagent’s next to the station
are bunches of sweet peas, wrapped in pink tissue:

you buy some, and bury your face as you walk,
sun and wind on your skin, in butterfly petals,
pale pinks and lilacs, white, their summer smell –
as if you were returning from the underworld

to find the meadows blossoming once more.
Each life echoing, acting out these myths:
going into darkness, re-emerging, wounds
and griefs healed over, the luscious world

still there, offering itself up to us over and over
again; not an afterlife, not something dangled
in the future – those fields of asphodel – with absences,
abstractions, but this life with its city streets,

its fizz and mix and mess, its rush of sweet-pea scent,
the lightness of their petals, their brief and lovely bloom.