Status Updates From The Absurd Demise of Poulna...

Two icy hearts pumping regal blood, each heartbeat summer and winter, her autumnal breath blowing the leaves right from the trees so to breathe new life in the spring brings me by a circular route back to Anna and Humphrey, the royal family with whom I began these updates.
Although they are very, very different, this has been a strangely fitting book to read in the wake of Finnegans Wake.

She was there. Her pale skin naked in riparian shade. Ripples casting wide a rising nebula...She'd spoken of ends that were beginnings, and in beginnings, ends foretold. And how a river is born and flows, a watershed of possibilities, reduced in descent by the inexorable attraction of the ocean. And how from that vastness it arises...clouding the land...so that rains fall as they must...where cycles engender cycles

She looked up as she spoke, her hands grasping the air as if she could pull those very clouds overhead down close. Salted spray splashed them as she stared out to sea. He watched her, fiddling with the empty carcass of a crab, and marveled at her sadness, for in the twilight she mergedblue into the ocean, indistinguishable but for her hair and the faintcurve of a tremblingsmile I see river metaphors throughout

She looked about and where once had stood a town there was none but a steeple, an ancient fort, the occasional break revealing grey stone and crushed concrete, and to the horizon trees, a delta spreading out like capillaries, blood gushing in descent, spreading murky fertility into a muddywomb, into that great royalexpanse. She saw no one but this primordialscene. She heard no one but the longmurmur of rustlingleaves

I love to find parallels between the books I've been reading. Poulnabrone recalls the flooding of the Liffey valley in 1940 to form a reservoir lake at the confluence of the King and Liffey rivers near Humphreystown Bridge in Wicklow. What interests me is that James Joyce finished Finnegans Wake in 1939, the main characters of which are the Liffey river, Anna Livia and her partner Humphrey, a kinglike figure. Curious

I've had some rough times at times with some of the prose constructions and whatnot. But then paragraphs like this one on page 196 and its preceding scenes making me say, Yes!