From the recording Riversdale
A psychologically impressionistic poem in which memory operates through fragments, sensory detail and surreal association. Beneath its observational humour lies a quieter emotional landscape, where childhood experience is reconstructed through the strange, selective logic of remembering.
Lyrics
Saltlight
Gold Hollywood curtains:
upholstery beneath plastic skin.
Crooked teeth—
dry-stone walls slip shifting, bone by bone.
Mirrored vans,
carpet rolled, Swiss-roll tight,
copper pots, minted light.
Fortune teller, tar-black hair
tangled in Claddagh gold.
Signpost arms point nowhere,
black-shawl directions,
the tongue of Connacht tacked to the weather’s grin.
Mum’s hair lacquered; fly spray.
Italians hitch the sun’s heat in paper grease.
Rain—
r
i
c
e.
We slept, packed in silver.
Crows
lift
golf balls,
mistaking moons.
Ragworms,
pincers, pliers.
Sprats glitter,
the sea’s small change.
Fifty wands for water;
I reeled a seagull,
wings thrashing for my borrowed seas.
The coastline grinned; voices echoed,
hooking a dancing mackerel;
a seal bent it, barking applause,
vanished in saltlight.
Citroën 2CV Charleston—
a lady bronzed to chestnut, uncorking red light;
her home galloped on chrome.
Leaving Sunday,
a drift of caravans, heavy with our silences,
each one—towing its own
ghostlight: all we didn’t say.
All we didn't say.
All we didn't say.