On Reading Michael Longley's Snow Water

How casually death wanders through these poems.
Not so much the dying, as the settling of remains.
A thistly bed for you, with space for Edna should she choose it;
Viney's ashes swashing Thallabaun.

This question of the right place. Vital:
all that is mortal of us needs the time to wane—
to ramble round a bit and check the otter-runs,
to dabble in wet sand along the lapping edge.

Michael, you have grown serene and almost eager
to slough the snake-skin of intrigues, alarms, excursions
that once made up your life. Bare feet and rolled up trousers.
Edna in her nightdress counting swans.

Such grace. Such coming round full circle to the quiet of things.
The names of apples and of barges.
Flavours of snowy lickings that the shot ice-cream man sold.
You are living now with honed precision:

tea scoops and burial mounds,
the hover of a peregrine above your breastbone.
And all that turbulent past frailed-down like tissue—
the tissue she once spread to cut the dress that bound your lives.