Telescope

When you spread before me playbills
on which print now looks old fashioned
and figures of actors are lit in black and white,
        as through a telescope
        time is suddenly shortened.
 
When we go to the boathouse
around which water laps, a house looks over the straits;
when you tell me your impressions of what it was
to row, to be part of a crew,
        that which was far off
         is suddenly close, in detail.
 
You have brought
 this odd corner of looming rock barely covered in bracken, grass, trees;
  these paths and roads that are so steep I’m always breathless;
   this sudden wind and rain that shoots in hard squalls;
    this pier that runs out unprotected into the sea;
     this little town that clings to the valley bottom,
all that the past gave me – to life. In focus.
 

Sara Boyes

published in Envoi, Issue 168, Cinnamon Press, ISSN 0013-9394