I needn’t ask you what you’re doing here, for this is where everything washes clean away from your eyes, as they go more blind.

The door is closed where someone knocks and knocks; they can wait there all morning, you don’t mind. No reason why you shouldn’t just remain here, where the ground is lit up like a stage for miles, then miles on miles; with a light heart, so light it’s almost weightless, you might hit the proper name for this wide-open place, if ever you had named it: the waves pour over its moving sand that never changes. In the Irish that neither of us can speak it is Tír na nÓg, the land of youth, and where nothing goes far, or ever comes to an end.

I see it as if the thin bars of a cage laid a grid across that sky, and small rain was changing the light; but it keeps its shine enough to make my eyes sore. When I hear you say deliberately, with your voice weak, how well you loved him, everything arranges itself for me wherever it might fit: I loved badly, hurt others, and brought hurt on my own head – but you couldn’t see my face even if I said so, or if I could send word of it to your ears, through the great roar where voices only whisper, and blood sings.

Nobody there knows they’ve been left behind, or that we might be looking, listening. As a gull takes off with something in its beak, the clouds high up demolish and restore themselves, raked by the same sun, and the rocks hold their colours. Now we begin to gauge everybody’s look; the last of the race, we are the simplest shapes that float and flit

78