Marathon

Suddenly the wind is still. Temporary silence in the sky and then the rumble on the road. Breathe in, breathe out and this strange journey begins.

John McLaughlin

Resistance

Resistance and counter-resistance of the medium. The delicate touch followed by the thrashed guitar, drum and bass in time. Comprehension is not important. The wind doesn't care about tears. It is enough to balance precariously; first one foot then the other. Listen to that! Every day you are different.

Aidan Higgins

Reading

Aidan Higgins plies me with gin and I read for him. Teamwork. I sit in the more comfortable chair. Aidan, with his failing eyesight, tries to stare into the middle-distance can perhaps make out a glimmer of light at the tunnel's end. He listens intently to his own uncompromising words flowing from my mouth. Balcony of Europe. Drinks with the dastardly baron. Martin Bormann slinks in and out of the room, savage and stealthy. I hear Alannah return and close the door downstairs. I take a swig of gin and embark upon the retelling of Aidan's first, fated marriage. It crumbles before my eyes. Aidan breathes heavily beside me and Alannah tiptoes into the room. Infidelity is recounted in painful detail. Love. It stings.
We talk together afterwards, clear the air. Banville, McGahern, Trevor, Mahon. Derek's mother called him an oddity. Said when he was little he wanted to be an aeroplane. She'd watch him from a window, running around the garden arms outstretched. Aidan and Alannah recall a reading in Toronto where he did the same thing as he read, taking off beneath the bright lights.

Sonnet I

even just to enter the surf
wrapped up in funereal black
bare blubber in the bubbles
the shock of that fierce slap
tossed around and shaped
stripped to a pale bone
thrown up on the high tide
trodden down in the sand

and in silence in a car
a couple watch the waves
crash down without them
almost time to go now
the sky darkens into October
and the wind roars in their ears