All Items Of Value

Read some interesting stuff on the net today, including a poem by C.K. Williams on the Tin Hat Magazine and a good essay on memory on another magazine I'd never heard of, called Brevity.

I've noticed this boarded-up house (on Cumberland Street, Dún Laoghaire) before and had it pegged as a photo-stage-set. Not my favourite way to take photographs, but it serves, and I think I found the right walk-on actor.

Afterwards, I took her majesty for a walk on the West Pier (I had already taken her for a run earlier). I noticed the Swift heading in past Howth. It was windy but with sharp evening sun peering over a jumble of cloud, some white and skittish but also those great slaty rain-mountains that are still grazing what passes for early summer.

I've always liked the tattiness of this pier, the East's down-at-heel twin. There are long, luxuriant strips of unmown grass, with daisies and dandelions; no bandstands, or stately, Victorian airs. The soundtrack is yachts, which Derek Mahon described (in the poem 'Kinsale') as 'tinkling and dancing in the bay / like racehorses.’ It is a kind of music, an amalgam of wind-chimes and a more rapid kind of chittering, like a tincan dawn (or dusk) chorus. Lovely accompaniment to a stroll on the pier though I imagine it might make sleeping on a yacht difficult (if people do sleep on the things while they are in the harbour).