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Irish Pages LTD
EquinoxAuthor(s): Gary AllenSource: Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006), pp. 60-61Published by: Irish Pages LTDStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30057412 .
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IRISH PAGES
by a grinning fool in a baseball cap sitting in perverse judgement behind him
and laughing - the small-bore calibre
rattling around my friend's skull
like a bird trying to escape:
they are with me now as never before
saying, All is our fate
and we the fate of all
purgatory is the early hours of daylight the forest clearing, the seashore,
the lightness of a soul that comes back,
a James who suddenly shakes himself free of the desert and rises to the task of small things
as a voice finishes preaching in the next room.
60
EQUINOX
Out across the fields, another winter is coming -
and I want to hide again weary of too much time and shorter days.
Bosch's men are at the bottom of the lane with their wheelbarrows and blue boiler suits -
happy children brushing up leaves,
they seem to know so much more than the rest of us
as they shout to one another in a language that is familiar, yet distant
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IRISH PAGES
something we have lost along the way: in our ignorance, everything is reduced to a likeness of ourselves.
The lights are coming on
though the horizon is still hard white
and in that moment before the true darkness the blue shadows of the kitchen the impression of dry branches iron railway-lines, bare telegraph-poles
I wait for some meaning, or inherent truth that never come from an earth farther from the sun:
then I think of them, not long removed their rakes and shovels aligned in some shed skins of mould and rotten leaf hanging from nails -
and I see them at a high table
breaking bread, pouring water
every movement precise and concentrated like a night frost, or a moon's ascent -
or a miracle for the few.
61
AFTER THE CONFERENCE
I fell in love one late Autumn afternoon with the enclosed cement courtyard of a Blackpool hostel
the feeble sun falling down the webbed guttering to the weedy flags
and settling for this extended moment on a drain choked with a clump of nettles:
no cliffs or wooded headland fall to the sea -
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