New Year

When I wake up in the afternoon

on the 1 st of January

I do not feel guilty.

I feel the seagulls who called me to sleep in the fresh new hours I went to bed in

crying now in my chest in joy that the sky is so large and the earth so full of tourists

and I go out on to the patio in my pyjamas and my new coat and I breathe great greedy lungfuls

of that hopeful air you only get on the coast.

We are late leaving for our walk

and the sky is already darkening when we reach

the deep red sand

and the North Atlantic is colder than I have ever felt her

and the cold is a good, hearty, full cold that holds you firm enough that you know where

your feet are meant to be,

and I am beaming out at the horizon till the freezing waves

have gifted me a numbness in my feet that tells me

I’m solid like I should be, and I’m more

here than I have been anywhere in a very long time.

When we top the cliffs the sky is dark and grey but not close,

and it’s full of the ocean and when my friends line up on the rock to look out like sea birds

I leave them to walk on a bit

to slip round the silhouettes of what might be trees in the daytime

past the final dogwalkers

and on into this beautiful darkness

and part of me wants to

walk with this night into February, to

keep walking, keep walking

from here to land’s end.

But I do stop, and when I get back to my friends they are coming up to

meet me, and we turn and go the rest of the way together,

and I won’t stop humming auld lang syne to them

till we reach the fire and the dinner table.

When I wake up in the morning

on the 2 nd of January

I feel like

I’ve found something that I thought I’d left on the beach long ago,

something small and solid and cold to the touch and which pulls me

back through the door into the outside air,

where the church bells are pealing

and the seagulls are screaming

and the wind is singing high up in the rooftops,

and I can’t see the sea from here,

but there is salt like a future on my tongue.