Friendship is a strange thing.

Isn’t it sometimes true that friendship is something that we only appreciate when it is over with? When something breaks down, or the death of one party brings it to a close. Michel De Montaigne, the 16th century French essayist, and David Whyte, the present-day poet and spiritual teacher, have written powerful short pieces about what friendship is, what friendship means. Countless others have done likewise.

This poem by Irish poet Michael Longley charts the contours of a friendship from a sort of grief.

It’s a type of grief that might be unique to friendships between men, which so often pass with an understanding that never takes shape in words. Or maybe more accurately, does not take place in spoken words. Because either the spoken word has a rank incompleteness, or we are painfully inarticulate in how to speak and painfully untrained in how to listen.

Death is everywhere here. The cancer that took Joe O’Toole. The funeral the poet missed. The burial mound at Templedoomore. The badger tugged by the feet into the ditch. A dying otter. And yet death here is not ugly. It is, in a way, beautiful. Beautiful, at least, in a way that all essential things are beautiful, a beauty that goes way beyond aesthetic pleasure, that goes maybe to the soul, whatever that is.

As a postscript, while reading up about this poem, which was included in Longley’s 1998 collection “Selected Poems”, I found a sequel of sorts, “The Otter’s Funeral”, published on the Facebook page of the poet’s daughter, the artist Sarah Longley, in 2022.

You can read “Between Hovers” here

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