It was late. I was in my room
above Botany Bay, the cherry blossoms below
hidden in darkness, the windows
two black rectangles against the night.
I faced a page of quantum mechanics,
the equations spilling down the sheet
in ordered progressions of uncommon logic.
I was trying to understand some
intractable movement from one line
to another and stared at the page, puzzled.
Quite suddenly, I grasped it, the elegant
equations coming into clarity, then dissolving
in front of me. It was as if I had glimpsed
for a moment beyond the numbers and symbols
to the luminous totality of the reality beneath,
the intricate structure at the base of everything
opening like a door onto a passageway
that I didn’t know existed.
I came back to my senses and the room,
dazed and changed. The cherry blossoms still
swayed below, there yet concealed in darkness,
hiding their daylight brilliance, like the world
I had just encountered, fleeting but actual –
and everything I had known to be certain,
questioned.
© Noel Duffy
Picture 10752181, photograph by Johan De Meester, image copyright Mary Evans / Ardea
Noel Duffy was born in Dublin. He has published four collections of poetry to date, most recently Street Light Amber, a narrative sequence of love poems set in his native city. He has twice been a recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary for Literature and more recently he was awarded the Patrick & Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. He lives in Dublin’s dockland district.
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