China

There's a moment the air will thicken and the light shift, as if another country has poured itself in, another life lent its …

There's a moment the air will thicken and the light shift, as if another country has poured itself in, another life lent its corona and suddenly the stars are here, milk spills across the heavens; whoever you are ripples, splits, multiplies, whatever there is flickers before your eyes and if slowly the planet diminishes, if finally the ground steadies under your feet and the spinning tongues resolve into the one sentence in the one place, you'll still walk with giant feet, still fall through the air, still speak as if a shadow lengthened across the language

or it will happen like this: a sudden, butchery odour on the street and the pavement opens, the sky parts, something floating back with such clarity it pulls you short: an old early morning, your hand slipped back and falling into your mothers, a few yards of strange brightness, first a green shop then a blue, a clock striking overhead and then it's gone, then a blur, the rest of the journey irrecoverable. What did it want? Nothing more than to say this particular moment is on its own track, in its own time, and if you should fall sideways into it, fall gladly

or you are staring out the window, going nowhere, you are patrolling the gardens of China and a shrub will open its bright door, a certain aspect of gravel, a tender tilt of the planet -

Yet how foolish to have imagined otherwise, to have thought our abandoned selves would not go on without us, quite unconcerned, not to have noticed the small army marching beside us, on its way to China, to Lipton's for groceries, to portal after portal.

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We could be there now, loafing on stars, on a hammock hung from days, watching the light that lends us to the future and sometimes calls us back and sometimes washes through us whatever it has touched, a drift that settles in our bones, that tells us we can no more live singly than light can fall on one place only.

Peter Sirr was born in Waterford in 1960. In 1982 he won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and, in 1999, the O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award of the Centre for Irish Studies, University of St Thomas, St Paul. appears in his latest collection, Bring Everything (published last month by Gallery Press).