The beach was empty of all things unseaworthy, except for the flowers, palely bedraggled and indistinguishable from the salt-ridden seaweed. The mourners cast them upon the grey waves only for the waves to cast them back.
The wake was being held in the cliff-top manor, the noise of which could even be heard at the sea’s edge. Tiny shapes danced slowly across the bay windows, since nobody had possessed the foresight to draw the long heavy curtains across the huge expanses of moonglit glass.
From the beach, though, with fitful frothy gurgles of prematurely night-stained sea in frisky dalliance with my bare toes, the manor appeared as small as a windswept dolls house precariously set against the precocious deepening of the sky.
I was to try to force my pebble-stung body up the sheer cliff to join the jollity, for jollity it would surely become if the corpse became a guest.
(Night Songs 1992)
