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)