Vertigo on the Glenshane Pass

I was not bothered by the stitching under your eye

until we reached the plateau and you fell in the heather

where a barbed wire fence covered a seam in the sky,

stitching the clods of earth and the clouds together

as if it would take no more than a turn of the wind

to unthread each half and lift one clean of the other,

shearing the sky to a darkness that would never end,

with one of us tumbling upwards in perpetual freefall

the other strung on a barbed knot of steel by one hand,

all life on the globe scabbing over like a loose eyeball

unmoored on a nerve and dulling to cataracts slowly,

the dry world darkening, fences and heather and all.

"Vertigo on the Glenshane Pass" is from The Salt Harvest (Seren Books, 2011).