Having moved through the years like clouds;
reached a crescendo, passed through it,
and still travelling to an ending.
Upward or downward?
It seems like the perspective of height;
the weighing up of the steps that have brought me here,
each built one atop the other,
but sometimes contrary like Escher’s stairs,
labyrinthine, incomprehensible like a mind;
maybe I am.
A low February sun is accentuating the straight edges of the patio bricks, the uneven
surfaces of the stonework in the pillars beneath the lamps, the darkness of the shaded
sides of ivy leaves and limbs of winter trees. From a clay-blue sky, it is casting its gold-dust
light across the abandoned railway siding, out over the bay to the mountains, Sliabh League
to Killybegs, casting them in a distant, gauzy mysteriousness.
The friary bell-tower shows above the trees, a pitched roof and bare metal cross.
From here, it might as well be deep in woodland, abandoned, overgrown even;
not so, it stands beside the road with lawns and parking spaces to the front, elaborate
grottos; in red brick, a modern take on cloisters leads from the church to the house;
on Sundays cars line the roadsides; the priest’s voice drones from loudspeakers.
The heathers in the flowerbed are in full bloom, gleaming shrubbery leaves suggest recent
rainfall but they are dry, the sun reflecting back, a million lights; and into my eyes,
a clear shining liquid ‒ exhilarating sunlight ‒ life brimming and uncontained; as though
this world was a bottomless well, a never-ending source of happiness, and still, to know
that around the curve of the earth, a five hour flight, the sun is shining on darkness.
Sailing the shifting geographies of the sky,
I captain the wind. Travelling with the ocean within my wings,
scanning the churning seas, I defy its rearing cliffs,
bloated-bellied monsters, fly beneath their drool-dripping teeth;
all contained in my eyes, their heaving guts, I soar, glide and swoop,
pull the jewels from their pockets.
On flattened wings I sweep from the edges of continents;
pulling the tides in my wake; see the sun over the horizon and follow.
