all depends on a sense of mystery;
the same things in a different light.
Your whiskey glass and the watercolour
just off-centre are
part of this. The electric pallor
of that apple, also. And the slow
arc of an indoor palm, the vase beside it blooming
with shadows. Do you remember how
the power cuts caught us unawares?
No candles and no torch. It was high
summer. A soft brightness clung in the poplars,
for hours it seemed. When it went out,
everything we knew how
to look for had disappeared. And when light
came back, it came back as noise:
the radio; the deep freeze singing.
Afterwards we talked of it for days -
how it felt at the upstairs window,
to stand and watch and still miss the moment
of gable ends and rooftops beginning
to be re-built. And that split second when
you and I were, from a distance,
a neighbourhood on the verge of definition.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Eavan Boland, 1990
