I have heard of your late death. Let me think about it. This is not news to be entertained quickly. Too near the knuckle. Too far from the cold head. There will be a removal soon and a burial hard on it. I will come to them when you do.
I shall walk the long maze now and take my afternoon constitutional along the magic bóithrín where I have walked for seven years. I shall meditate, mostly on myself, for Death makes Siamese Twins of everyone. This maze is a place of ivy and rowan and other plants that transgress the fixed boundaries of logic, flowering here with enchantment but rooting on the other side, channels of draíocht and sorcery. Once there were oaks here. Those sacred groves were cut down long ago and sent in chains
to hold up the roofs of foreign churches. It is said that our ancestors belonged to both sides.
After the news reached me the weather took a strange course and in a flash the cold drizzle changed to hot sunlight and all around me yellow flowers burst out golden and hopeful. The fallacy is a pathetic one I know but I cannot help believing in it. The air here now smells sweet and of blackberries. The wind sings in the telegraph wires and has stopped its miserable keening. The sun bounces back from the road, hot on ankles, hot on hands, quite amiable.
It is seven years today since I arrived and found the last four-leafed clover in a fifty year chain of finds growing here between the wheel tracks. I have never found one since. Perhaps the last one marked a journey completed. Over these years every cell in my old body has been exchanged for a new green one. Here I am older but in a brand-new body walking the same bóithrín. In another seven years I shall be the same age as you were yesterday, my late neighbour. The year is shrinking. The hawthorn berries are already reddening. They look like the bowls of small polished briar pipes s
et among thorns. Summer slides in imperceptible slippage towards the fall, and the year is smouldering away.
A large brown dragonfly stops before me treading air. Does it know I’m here? The Ryan jet, the one with the everlasting prow, passes overhead. Heaven's trumpets resound in the blue air. It is a vast blue canopy now, not just enough to make a sailor a pair of trousers! It has become suddenly big enough to be a complete sail; enough to pull the whole island off to somewhere else far away over the ocean.
Out of the ruined houses nettles leap barking like wolves, defensive and territorial, full of contained aggression. The ash trees sigh and whisper quietly; new-comers they, a green roof rising from the roofless parlour. People lived here and left the year I was born. They took their livestock and their roof with them. The ash trees are too young to remember. They know nothing of Death yet. They could ask the fuchsias. They know.
I shall walk the long maze now and take my afternoon constitutional along the magic bóithrín where I have walked for seven years. I shall meditate, mostly on myself, for Death makes Siamese Twins of everyone. This maze is a place of ivy and rowan and other plants that transgress the fixed boundaries of logic, flowering here with enchantment but rooting on the other side, channels of draíocht and sorcery. Once there were oaks here. Those sacred groves were cut down long ago and sent in chains
to hold up the roofs of foreign churches. It is said that our ancestors belonged to both sides.After the news reached me the weather took a strange course and in a flash the cold drizzle changed to hot sunlight and all around me yellow flowers burst out golden and hopeful. The fallacy is a pathetic one I know but I cannot help believing in it. The air here now smells sweet and of blackberries. The wind sings in the telegraph wires and has stopped its miserable keening. The sun bounces back from the road, hot on ankles, hot on hands, quite amiable.
It is seven years today since I arrived and found the last four-leafed clover in a fifty year chain of finds growing here between the wheel tracks. I have never found one since. Perhaps the last one marked a journey completed. Over these years every cell in my old body has been exchanged for a new green one. Here I am older but in a brand-new body walking the same bóithrín. In another seven years I shall be the same age as you were yesterday, my late neighbour. The year is shrinking. The hawthorn berries are already reddening. They look like the bowls of small polished briar pipes s
et among thorns. Summer slides in imperceptible slippage towards the fall, and the year is smouldering away.A large brown dragonfly stops before me treading air. Does it know I’m here? The Ryan jet, the one with the everlasting prow, passes overhead. Heaven's trumpets resound in the blue air. It is a vast blue canopy now, not just enough to make a sailor a pair of trousers! It has become suddenly big enough to be a complete sail; enough to pull the whole island off to somewhere else far away over the ocean.
Out of the ruined houses nettles leap barking like wolves, defensive and territorial, full of contained aggression. The ash trees sigh and whisper quietly; new-comers they, a green roof rising from the roofless parlour. People lived here and left the year I was born. They took their livestock and their roof with them. The ash trees are too young to remember. They know nothing of Death yet. They could ask the fuchsias. They know.
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