The Loop

Back on that loop, the road west. This time it was to Limerick to do three days of poetry workshops, as last year. Mostly sunny weather though the wolfish clouds were never out of sight. I played the usual stuff on the i-Phone, a mix of Mozart's Requiem and mostly 1980s music (Talking Heads, Bowie, etc.), which I hadn't bothered to update. So there were those ripples of nostalgia, like the swarmy little mirages of heat-hazed road. Funny the way certain aspects of landscape affect one, something ineffable, seeming to touch a kind of phantom nerve, a memory too far submerged to begin to surface. Not quite déjà vu, but a sense of doubling, a waft of meaning that lift and blows off.