*
In Thurles a couple pushing a buggy, a man on his knees, lost in the sacrament of trimming his front hedge and sweeping the trimmings with his kitchen brush, stopped to cross themselves.
Motorists switched off engines in the street and went on about their errands only after the inevitable, polished so they could see themselves in it, had passed.
*
“ Is M _______ home? Tell her not to come. I don’ t want her to see me like this.”
*
Searching for ways to be kind we offer ice, water from a straw. John brushes your hair. I recall your father in his Sunday clothes,
milking by hand, the white arc of warm milk in the byre dark entering our mouths, across the yard from the house you were born in.
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