Cradled in rare blue light
the island spreads out
below. I didn’t think I’d be able
to return this year,
but here is the house
with its stone table
and the sudden pheasant
with its surprising red crown
and the cows’ black flanks
shimmering
in early Irish summer.
Sounds of children
swimming in South Harbour,
and all the while
a smell of
fresh cut hay
mixing somehow
with lavender.
Sometimes
I think of the soul
as a winged visitor,
wandering here, then out of view.
Who made the painting
that hangs in the Louvre
just to the right of Giotto’s
‘St. Francis and the Birds’?
In it an angel kneels,
offers Mary a lily
as he rends
her life.
Each word a miracle,
but it’s the riffs of plumage,
the rainbowed wings,
that steal the show,
as if the painter
could not restrain himself,
as if paradise
were a tropical island
which he’d once
caught sight of.
A farmer burns gorse
at the end of the Bill,
black-backed gulls glide
through the plumes
but just beyond this,
against the background
of blue, a single sail
fills with light.
I travelled that way
this spring,
lay rocking in bed
as my boat rose,
the vibrations of something
I could not see
keeping me company
throughout the night
though I remember
no birds, or angels.
But there was something
like a sail—
no paradise,
not even a lily—
something, like
the trembling of a sail.