WAKING, and: ATARAXIA

9 5 R W A K I N G M A I R I M A C I N N E S A hole in the air o√ the island of Lundy, a hole in a head on the pillow this night, two of them, one in the other, containing a cauldron of black-and-white pu≈ns aflash, aflash as they whirr and soar and plummet, each like a well-flung bottle with trailing ribbon of feet and a red-and-blue lozenge of a beak in a white head that’s striped through the eye. The last hour of night. The windows pale. Quiet. The milkman hasn’t yet clanked up the path nor the postman or newsboy come tramping, the letterbox lid hasn’t yet clacked. The geese haven’t flown over the gardens, wings creaking like doors, giving each other advice. True, the sky has winched a crack of clear white line over the rooftops, true that pigeons clatter up from the ash trees (but now they clatter back). A blackbird practices one phrase and then another. Has someone spoken? No one. Was that the telephone? No. The pu≈ns lift o√ from rocks by the sea, from the floor of the bucket of mind and the hole in the air o√ Lundy: till, as they fling down the sky just this once again and rashly mount to summit grass, cramp strikes human legs, with sling-shot accuracy. Some watcher on the cli√s has got me. 9 6 Y I slip from my bed and hobble the cold floor (pu≈ns falling through the enormous air), and, yes, my legs come gradually free, and words fly out once more like pu≈ns after winter storms spent on the great sea clumped together like rafts: now they break camp (it’s April), whirr to the greening land and nest on cli√s in burrows, and hatch their young; and I that after all have no part in their kind watch the milkman come, still a youngish man, serving these houses like a messenger. 9 7 R A T A R A X I A M A I R I M A C I N N E S About six in the morning, light lemonish in the sky, frost hemming pantiles and roof-trees, corralling leafy lawn, leafless sycamore, crab apple, benches, the table for breakfast in July. The big bare sycamore’s hung with a dozen pigeons, feathers pu√ed in the frost, plus – from an old gale – two plastic bags. Now the sky’s a blue in which two seagull squadrons wheel in from the North Sea fifty miles o√, one overhead, the other diagonal. Now new clear light fills garden between its walls. A man emerges on a balcony, yawns, retires. The gulls will be floating on the river now among mallards and greylags, even a swan or two. But six or eight blackbirds sit in the crab-apple tree eating red apples each the size of a cherry, and now there’s a magpie among them, flash madam, black, white, burly, screeching. The blackbirds scatter. I’d say there were twenty tiny apples to see us through till spring. ...