by Paul Casey.

1.

Just as the pillars meet a mile above the architrave

A sky splinter plummets to puncture the floodplain

A standing stone of city glass acute enough to scrape

the skyline, raze the tideline, wield a fist of cumulous

A capstone of progress is washed clean by the sun

A stylite-engineer tests the lean of the cornerstone

As gravity, reversed in the top percentile sends

rich minds skyward, just clouds for parachutes

The man with the paraglider has built a ramp

at the very top above his penthouse eyrie, early

everyday spirals down around a thousand windows

a thousand silent lightboxes empty as lives en suite

There’s sand from the rock of Barra in the concrete

from Ballingeary, Inniscarra, Atlantic in the glass

2.

River waters laugh into history’s estuary

where floods ever migrate, recede to accede

The tower’s north side is half-lost in cloud reflection

The sun burns a portal through the plexus of its illusion

Passing by traffic lights bus windows airbrush passengers’

faces with fresh graffiti, stone walls, posters, pedestrians

In a main street mirror, a blur catches its owner off guard

He sees the speed but not the face of his puzzled likeness

The stock room of the medi-clinic is filled with plastic

cards, booze-rattle, metal quakes from the ALDI aisles

From further back in the queue, the teller’s eyes are colourless

At the till, only a hint of copper glints from the vanished blue

At the window end of the bar the afternoon runs like a film into the pint glass

How intimate the world turns through the distance of surfaces, how oblivious

3.

New lives shimmer up and down the soundproof aquarium

Imagine immortal interiors, the small releases from gravity

Street shoulders prefer the give of lime, of sandstone, the weights

of newspaper and lateral symmetries, urbanities, familiar rhythms

A splinter of sky has pierced the riverbed, recalibrated

the azimuth, realigned migrant magnetites and micro-

climates for swallows to clear, with token sundial shadows

arcing slowly over fates and fulacht-fiadh inspired jacuzzis

Designer stone circles distinct as sunken sculptures in Cancun

Reefs reset for Tartarus in nine short days, an artificial equinox

Corals of consequence, stark and lifeless in the seething seas

Artefacts of glass and stone whose only sculptor is silence

From the crest of Patrick’s bridge, the Lee stirs life into city lights

A moon frogleaps across a seal’s back into the neon subconscious

First published in The Elysian, (New Binary Press, 2017)