27 NOVEMBER 1993, Page 39

Janice

My love, my softy, my brown swan, swimming now in the brimming river of my affections . . . Will you swim on forever and forever?

My love, my freckled gardener busy with balm and briony, Americanly kind and conscious of the limitations of irony .

supportive to a fault, hurt by local abrasiveness, our wit, the winding up and putting down, brilliance that has no heart in it.

I grow less Irish every year with kindly love to lean upon. Our home and garden is my nation, my freckled gardener, my swan.

James Simmons