Hard wind on the turn at Cappaghmore.
You drive on, on the cusp of light,
along the old road past Mortyclough.
To think it’s taken me a lifetime
to cool my heels and lay the specious dream
spun through nameless cities, cold lakes,
and dark bodies nullifying loss.
Life lost to evasions and abstractions,
to poisons and residua.
It is daylight on the Western Shore
the cold tide on the turn.
What remains of what was lived?
A torn bird on bleak grass,
a hand laid upon a wound,
lives taken, or granted some reprieve.
Did I touch my bleeding head on the 14th floor,
hear someone allude to sickness,
glimpse the destiny that would unfold,
find a dogtooth in the urinal – the blood still fresh,
feel the warmth of a dead man’s hand in mine?
Who walks with me now on the edge of daylight?
The same that walked with Crean
on the down slope of South Georgia.
we walk differently in darker times,
touch loved faces with a different grace,
knowing someone or something
walks the complex water beside us,
doubted entities, life-stalkers on the salt edge waiting,
the thread between us drawn like spittle.
Generations read through constant mirrors,
veined opaque dreams,
convex pans across realities,
presences withering into wind calls,
life encoded in fragments,
the membrane fingered, dimpled, punctured,
gasping for the first breath and the last,
the truth……the truth being
merely a breath away from everyone.
