The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

The lost watch was on Phil’s wrist. Unbelievable. It had been there all along. She spread her fingers on the trackpad to enlarge the image. The same tan-coloured leather strap, the same creamy iridescence fanned out from the centre of the dial. Carmel remembered the way he used to dangle it into her small hand in the evening. The way the milled steel held the concentrated warmth of his skin, while the glass on the other side stayed cool. When she set it against her ear, there was a tiny churning before each tick : Nearly. Now. Nearly. Now. And. Yes. The mechanism was delicate and relentless. It was full of anticipation and power.

For Imelda, information was like money. She didn’t want you to have it, in case you spent it in the wrong shop.

‘The way they ignored each other was more alert and intricate than another couple’s kissing. Theirs was a great passion, darkly ecstatic. They both knew it could not last.’

The way to see the bird you want to see, is to stop looking for it, we all know this. You have to undo your gaze, let the bird happen without you. Be alert to blue.

I said that I was not born out of love, I was born out of utility.

The way they ignored each other was more alert and intricate than another couple’s kissing.

What is it about handwriting? I said. Makes it look so truthful and private.

Consider the poet called Harvey. He is standing at the postbox, his beautiful, heartfelt letter is halfway into the slot and, he’s like, Is it, maybe, a bit mad? The envelope falls and . . . too late! His words are in the gap – sent but still unseen. That chasm from which arise Terrible Uncertainty and Terrible Joy. A place so unbearable, it is where we live all the time now, checking for the likes.

This guy likes to explain things. He likes to tell you what you are saying and why he agrees with you. This sometimes feels like he is agreeing with himself, but I find it ticklish and nice. Better than being told what you are saying and why you are wrong

Auckland is a sweet, suburban place built on dead volcanic fields. Up on the surface, you are surrounded by bungalows made of wood and by people with a certain kind of face (white, narrow, hearty) but sometimes you sense the lava stirring far below. And from this rocky perch, in the middle of an Irish night, I send my dream texts into sleeping screens. Eighteen thousand kilometres between us. I like the delay. It feels peaceful. –

In the distance, the white buildings of the city, green hills and peninsulas of the Hauraki Gulf, choppy waters, darkened by wind. Behind us, black lava fields fringed by crimson-flowered trees. The mountain we are sitting on came up out of the sea 600 years ago. We are on young ground. From where I am sitting, the past is a lonely place.

there was something about the size of the solid planet between us that made a snoop feel safe.

I don’t think he ever used my name, unless as a taunt.

He only hurts people for their pleasure. Only ever sexually, which is completely fine, because women really want that. I certainly did. He is only horrible when people beg him to be.

My favourite things to see from above are the calibration targets in the deserts of China and America, built for passing satellites to refocus their cameras; sand-blown, monumental grids and barcodes, most of them now obsolete.

We went home to Europe the slow way. We flew up to Cairns and did the reef, then went on to Denpasar for some hotel life on the way to Nusa Penida. I chose this island because of the jalak Bali, a white mynah with an easy-going, loose white crest, and vivid blue skin around the eye, very chatty and imitative, and so endangered there are only a hundred or so mating couples left. This bird we did not see, though we did have an encounter with the passing manta rays, a creature I also failed to spot until I stopped checking from side to side and looked straight down where I saw a spread black cloak flying along the sandy floor. We swam down to the seabed, flippers going like crazy, and turned to meet another ray coming straight at us, with its weirdly open box-mouth, curved around by scooping fins. This manta sheered up and passed over my right shoulder, its white belly like the meaty underside of a low-flying plane.

I am checking through images taken in utero, those blood astronauts with shiny black pips for eyes. I am thinking about a tree, I don’t know where it was. But I remember lying on the grass under this tree with my eyes closed, knowing everything above me, the movement of leaves, the sunlight. The space was legible. I knew it with that other, unnamed sense which tells you where things are. A waterfall to my left, some distance away, and on my right, Carmel, sitting.

All poems, Phil says, are of love unrequited. I am not sure there is any other kind of poem. And you know, I am not sure there is any other kind of love.

It is not the girl, it is not one girl or another girl, it is the fact that she is not there. And when she’s gone, there is none like her.

The world has turned into the place where people get hurt, where the man I love will one day die. Everything speaks to me of his safety, his proximity – time is a mechanism to measure how long we are apart. It’s not that I think about him constantly, he is my way of thinking. His mind is my compass, his eyes my only mirror. Every night we roll down bamboo shutters against the forest and he does not enter my dreams or leave them, because we dream together. My body knows he is there. When we wake, we want the same thing.

Jesus, Lily, you are so competitive, I think. You grab everything, you suck the life out of all that I do and have. So now I am off on a rant about Lily, I have lost my own grandfather, and the man I love is bleeding to death, somewhere out to sea.

This is the Mama-hex which says that whatever you put indelibly on your skin will turn out to be the wrong thing, over time.

There is a moral pleasure to be found in the encouragement of beautiful work

There was like a month of her life when Carmel knew what she wanted, when the things in shops made complete sense to her and the house will be set in that month for years to come.

‘Irish people all talk like old women,’ said Nell. ‘Even the men.’