~For Bill (final draft)

I remember some photos, siblings arranged like a tree;

exploring the attics, and finding your things.

I wore some shorts of yours (I was ten or eleven)

and a schoolboy beret; and for the last two years, Bill,

I've been riding your bicycle from Salisbury.

Yes, I've been riding your bicycle,

up and down the river Lea, and all over East London.

That means such a lot to me. I remember you

looking inside my first camera.

I enjoyed talking on the phone. Even if I was about to leave,

by the front door, picking up the receiver,

I tried not to hang up too quickly,

especially in recent years. Not long ago we spoke

for half an hour, three quarters —

you talked about evolutionary biology and mathematics,

the NHS, victims of war,

female professors, your time at UCL;

it felt good that you were interested

in what I had to say on ancient Greece

— smell and memory strangely alive now,

days rushing up through the tears —

I cracked the oversized hub of the back wheel

carrying bottles of water downstream; I clamped the jagged fragment

to my desk to hold pens. And OK, due to a frosty derailer

the bicycle frame got torn on the towpath

opposite the brewery at Hackney Wick,

I got a new one at Bethnal Green,

but along with the dynamo-driven lightset

and all the moving parts

I asked them to save the front fork from it.

Mon oncle.

I keep it for truing wheels.