Noon at St. Michael's

Nurses and nuns — their sails whiter than those of the yachts in the bay, they come and go on winged feet, most of them, or in sensible shoes. July, and I should be climbing among stones or diving, but for broken bones, from the rocks below. I try to read a new novel set aside; but a sword-swift pain in the left shoulderblade, the result of a tumble in Sheridan Square, makes reading difficult: writing you can do in your head. It starts to rain on the sea, suddenly dark, the pier, the gardens and the church spires of Dun Laoghaire. You would think it was suddenly October as smoke flaps, the yachts tack violently and those caught in the downpour run for cover. But in a few minutes the sun shines again, the leaves and hedges glisten as if with dew in that fragrant freshness after rain when the world seems made anew before confusion, before pain; and I think of you, a funny-face but solemn, with the sharpest mind I know, a thoughtful creature of unconscious grace bent to your books in the sun or driving down to New York for an evening on the town. Doors open wherever you go in that furious place; for you are the light rising on lost islands, the spéir-bhean the old poets saw gleam in the morning mist. When you walk down Fifth Avenue in your lavender suit, your pony eyes opaque, I am the one beside you, and life is bright with the finest and best. And I have seen, as you have not, such is your modesty, men turn to watch your tangle of golden hair, your graceful carriage and unhurried air as if you belonged to history of ‘her story’, that mystery. You might have been a saint or a great courtesan, anachronistic now in some ways, in some ways more up-to-date than the most advanced of those we know. While you sit on your sun-porch in Connecticut re-reading Yeats in a feminist light I am there with you.