rays are longest.  Roygbiv Vance taught us:  red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.  A star I see.  Venus?  Can’t tell yet.  Two.  When three it’s night.  Were those nightclouds there all the time?  Looks like a phantom ship.  No.  Wait.  Trees are they?  An optical illusion.  Mirage.  Land of the setting sun this.  Homerule sun setting in the southeast.  My native land, goodnight.

Dew falling.  Bad for you, dear, to sit on that stone.  Brings on white fluxions.  Never have little baby then less he was big strong fight his way up through.  Might get piles myself.  Sticks too like a summer cold, sore on the mouth.  Cut with grass or paper worst.  Friction of the position.  Like to be that rock she sat on.  O sweet little, you don’t know how nice you looked.  I begin to like them at that age.  Green apples.  Grab at all that offer.  Suppose it’s the only time we cross legs, seated.  Also the library today:  those girl graduates.  Happy chairs under them.  But it’s the evening influence.  They feel all that.  Open like flowers, know their hours, sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes, in ballrooms, chandeliers, avenues under the lamps.  Nightstock in Mat Dillon’s garden where I kissed her shoulder.  Wish I had a full length oilpainting of her then.  June that was too I wooed.  The year returns.  History repeats itself.  Ye crags and peaks I’m with you once again.  Life, love, voyage round your own little world.  And now?  Sad about her lame of course but must be on your guard not to feel too much pity.  They take advantage.

All quiet on Howth now.  The distant hills seem.  Where we.  The rhododendrons.  I am a fool perhaps.  He gets the plums, and I the plumstones.  Where I come in.  All that old hill has seen.  Names change:  that’s all.  Lovers:  yum yum.

Tired I feel now.  Will I get up?  O wait.  Drained all the manhood out of me, little wretch.  She kissed me.  Never again.  My youth.  Only once it comes.  Or hers.  Take the train there tomorrow.  No.  Returning not the same.  Like kids your second visit to a house.  The new I want.  Nothing new under the sun.  Care of P. O. Dolphin’s Barn.  Are you not happy in your?  Naughty darling.  At Dolphin’s barn charades in Luke Doyle’s house.  Mat Dillon and his bevy of daughters:  Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy, Louy, Hetty.  Molly too.  Eightyseven that was.  Year before we.  And the old major, partial to his drop of spirits.  Curious she an only child, I an only child.  So it returns.  Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.  Longest way round is the shortest way home.  And just when he and she.  Circus horse walking in a ring.  Rip van Winkle we played.  Rip:  tear in Henny Doyle’s overcoat.  Van:  breadvan delivering.  Winkle:  cockles and periwinkles.  Then I did Rip van Winkle coming back.  She leaned on the sideboard watching.  Moorish eyes.  Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow.  All changed.  Forgotten.  The young are old.  His gun rusty from the dew.