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You should have seen the sea in those days, wind smoke and weeping flares washing ashore from the barrios, all those hesitant evacuees, as tarpaulin stretched along Beaufort’s Dyke and our drift nets sailed through the Hebrides. Shuffling in pipe smoke, scribbling a plume of grave longing on the bones of a wax-bright dusk, I…

If you add up all the babies floating in space, if you climb to the top of a falling tree, if you drink up all the whiskey             in the Arabian Sea, you will have done something important for the human race, something of nonsense and impossibility.             If you see something disappear without a…

It seems farfetched, I know, but when we tethered toy horses in the lea of the patio the moon wept like a candle, and the dawn when it came crept along the dusty panhandle. Best not to worry the truth like that yarn about Turner strapped to the mast of the little ice age, better…

In Donegal we climbed over a cow gate, crossed through a field among hooded crows and earth smells, climbed a stile and stepped onto rain-mucked ground, to enter a small grotto where a stone St. Columba was surrounded by a yellow cigarette lighter, a key ring with green gremlin, a rain-swollen missal, a toy train,…

In Leeson Street? we find ourselves in a Georgian chapel of ease,? an elite mass rock, in an Irish lexicon,? in a credo unravelling, in ambivalent government attire, we stand, genuflect, stand again and disperse,? miming handshakes and the bluster of concern. What stains our hands— March as before whipped in a narrow light— as…

It makes me think of my other life, this minor chord from the room above, when it’s been within hearing—no, closer: moments when, if I stepped a certain way, or put out my hand… Mist this morning over the ball field. Maybe I am turning into a cloud. Last night I left my coat over…