Electric Light

Candle grease congealed, dark-streaked with wick-soot. Rucked alps from above. The smashed thumbnail of that ancient mangled thumb was puckered pearl, moonlit quartz, a bleached and littered Cumae. In the first house where I saw electric light she sat with her fur-lined felt slippers unzipped, year in, year out, in the same chair, and whispered in a voice that at its loudest did nothing else but whisper. We were both desperate the night I was left to stay with her and wept under the clothes, under the waste of light left turned on in the bedroom. "What ails you, child, what ails you, for God's sake?" Urgent, sorrowing ails, far-off and old. Scaresome cavern waters lapping a boatslip. Her helplessness no help. Lisp and relapse. Eddy of sibylline English. Splashes between a ship and dock, to which, animula, I would come alive in time as ferries churned and turned down Belfast Lough towards the brow-to-glass transport of a morning train, the very "there-you-are-and-where-are-you?" of poetry itself. Backs of houses like the back of hers, meat safes and mangles in the railway-facing yards of fleeting England, an allotment scarecrow among patted rigs, then a town-edge soccer pitch, the groin of distance, fields of grain like the Field of the Cloth of Gold, tunnel gauntlet and horizon keep. To Southwark, too, I came, from tube mouth into sunlight, Moyola-breath by Thames's "straunge strond." If I stood on the bow-backed chair, I could reach the light switch. They let me and they watched me, A touch of the little pip would work the magic. A turn of their wireless knob and light came on in the dial. They let me and they watched me as I roamed at will the stations of the world. Then they were gone and Big Ben and the news were over. The set had been switched off, all quiet behind the blackout except for knitting needles ticking, wind in the flue. She sat with her fur-lined felt slippers unzipped, electric light shone over us, I feared the dirt-tracked flint and fissure of her nail, so plectrum-hard, glit-glittery, it must still keep among beads and vertebrae in the Derry ground.