What were we thinking? What typically streams
when you’re being shot? A smile? The occasion
of a lens, presence enfolded by a Bronze age fort
(half dropped) on the exposed precipice, a storm –
welcoming western edge, without fresh water
as if land art by Goldsworthy & Long jewelers.
The limestone wall stops the ocean from inundating
Europe with a thin, pink bracelet of Thrift.
All these years unravelling the particulars of a life
with tongue-tied ghosts, music could be their medium
given their notions of time. They feel the waves
shaving grains and witness rollers crunching faults.
I have forgotten what the band played, or their sound
those memories abandoned, but I have a sense
of that Celtic horn entwining Tutankhamen’s
blowing the room into a thresh of sweat.
What really hangs is leaving the B&B on the way
to Joe Watty’s down the hill and stopping in front
of a small wind-whisked tree in an elastic dusk,
a Song Thrush singing music later than you think.
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause. Henri Bergson, 1907
