1
Outside a cave in the high dry mountains
a man squats on his heels, his eye drawn
to a hawk circling high in the blue of night.
Taking a deep cold breath, he makes the call.
Half a world away, a thin young man shaves
in cold water, pats his face dry, accepts the telephone
and listens. Nothing now left to say.
Halfway between these sparking points,
as the arc leaps from mouth to ear,
a man surfaces for a moment from deep sleep.
The stars look down, unwinking. He subsides.
2
She gathers briefcase, phone and keys,
looks once around her, tugs at her jacket hem –
the light in the hallway crisp and clear.
A look of her mother in the mirror,
something of her father in those eyes.
A life so far away. She turns to go,
then scratches on a yellow pad “Tonight. Phone home.”
How can we know? We’ll never know.
Hours later in Dublin a man stands in his garden,
drinking down lungfuls of September air, struck
by a vision of children on the leaf-bracked lawn.
3
How slow planes look when heavy banked on air,
you feel the weight of them in the thunder of engines,
a sense of the fore-ordained
in the long slow inward curve –
Did she glance out and see it hanging there,
set level towards her? Did she know what was coming?
Did she reach for her bag, somebody’s hand, the phone?
What was he thinking of, clean-shaved, there in the cockpit,
the glass wall accelerating towards him,
a window opening into a mountain cave?
How can we know? We’ll never know.
4
House to back wall, house to back wall, clean
and methodical he cuts and cuts, the engine
ticking out across the suburb, steady and sure.
And the phone rings.
He switches off, looks back over his shoulder.
A crow crawks out into the clear blue,
he walks towards the echoing dark house,
he disappears from view.
5
Autumn turned over into winter; the garden
lay silent, nothing flew above the half-cut lawn,
a broad stripe pared to the bone,
a swathe of lank grasses, seed heads bowed.
The house was a well of grief. Silence
poured out of it and kept on pouring into
the garden, over the wall,
out over the houses, into our dumbstruck lives.
A call plunged from a satellite and a family died.
The pieces will be falling forever, blast shards
from the mirror of shadows, unbearable rain.
6
He cut the lawn, at last. We watched him do it.
House to back wall. House to back wall.
Crows called to the engine. Stutter. Cacophony.
Step by step, house to back wall, he laid it all bare.
He never looked up, but he knew we were there,
willing him on, unable to speak or move.
The light died and he stood there under the silence,
and we stood there with him until it was full dark,
in our own pockets of shock, in our own stricken mortality
shook and unsure, alone with our thoughts.
The stars came out and hung in the high cold air.
House by house, light by light, we spoke back across the void.
