It's Time

It's time you made that call.
It's time to hug a telegraph pole.
It's time to opt for a less soluble brand of moon.
It's time to howl.
It's time for the decisively indecisive moment.
It's time to vote Vermilion.
It's time to let the moon put on its oldfangled photographer's hood.
It's time to get a new glass eye.
It's time that call made you.

Earlier that evening:
I drove rather aimlessly towards Dublin then, on a whim, turned left at Leeson Street bridge, along the canal road. I thought I might drive towards Harold's Cross but gave up when the traffic thickened near Rathmines. I turned back and pulled up near Kavanagh's bench (complete with seated Bronze statue). The light was gorgeous, the golds and greens in the old trees making a palette that inevitably drew you in. A lovely place to sit and daydream over the water with its tunnel of darklight. But it was the reflections of the trees that made me pause. They fished me out of myself, downwards, into an extraordinary richness. The shallow water seemed to 'develop' the colours into something deeper, to distil the evening more thoroughly than one might expect. I stalked back and forth, with my camera pointed downwards, like some demented travesty of moorhen or heron. To give you some idea of what netted my attention, I've linked to one of the shots I took here.

In the end, I didn't use any of the images as my centrepiece, because their innate beauty seemed so much more than anything I could bring to it. Kavanagh's lines come to mind of course:

"O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven."

Or, as a friend of mine, Anthony Glavin put it (in a poem alluding to and paraphrasing Kavanagh):

ON KAVANAGH'S CANAL

A flavour of personality. What brought that on?
I'd squat on the canal bank seat he sat on

To hear niagarously roar
The passionate transitory, the looked on, the lived for.

There were locks niagarously roaring and "green and blue things" aplenty. I can well imagine being 'reborn' in such a place.