Cityscape

I have a word for it — the way the surface waited all day to be a silvery pause between sky and city — which is elver. And another one for how the bay shelved cirrus clouds piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea, which is elver too. The old Blackrock baths have been neglected now for fifty years, fine cracks in the tiles visible as they never were when I can I can I can shouted Harry Vernon as he dived from the highest board curving down into salt and urine his cry fading out through the half century it took to hear as a child that a glass eel had been seen entering the seawater baths at twilight — also known as elver— and immediately the word begins a delicate migration — a fine crazing healing in the tiles — the sky deepening above a city that has always been unsettled between sluice gates and the Irish Sea to which there now comes at dusk a translucent visitor yearning for the estuary.