Matthew Sweeney

I am summoned: a double handclap from my mother’s ivory hands and I fill the silver tureen with pumpkin soup the colour of oranges. I enter on feet of air. Her smile subsides like a wave on sand pointing me towards the curtain of mauve velvet where I must stand.

Wine is shared. A toast to mother updates a grace before meals then the ladle becomes a wand and oohs climb from warmed...

White are the streets in this shabbiest- grown of the world’s great cities, whiter than marshmallow angels. Descending by parachute, one would be arriving in a world long dead. One would also be stiff with cold.

And if one, perhaps, would dangle there in a skeletal tree, swigging brandy from the equipment, rubbing fur ear-flaps, one would have a view of the street unhindered by...

Last year I was going downstairs, now I’m going upstairs. Up there is a rocking horse in red velvet. I’ll dust him off with a crow’s wing, then I’ll shake the kitchen ceiling. I’ll jump off in mid-buck, onto the round water-bed I bounced on with black-haired, patchouli-scented X to the drawl of Mick Jagger. I’ll take the brass telescope to the...

For Tom Lynch

Let’s go back to Mullett Lake in March and have a picnic on the ice. Let’s wrap up like Inuits, and meet three miles north of Indian River, where the jetty stands in summer front of 577 Grandview Beach. We’ll cram in Lynch’s vintage hearse and motor slowly out onto the ice, where I’ll spread my blue tablecloth and as it darkens...

For the umpteenth time I looked out at the sea but there was nothing to catch my eye, just a man wheeling a barrow up the beach. I looked again, frisking the whole expanse for a ship, a boat, any floating debris but all I saw was a cat in the marram grass slinking towards three rabbits playing. The waves were apologetic on the shingle, after the excesses of the previous night, and the sun had...