Michael Foley
Imminence
In that first city summer of shimmering heat every Underground station was Adlestrop, eerily pent ... and on every trip. But especially Finchley Road where, no whit less fair than a rose garden, buddleia burgeoned on waste ground and across the track I saw a girl waiting, so sensitive, yearning and disconsolate that I wanted to cry out: ‘I’m the one you seek, merely disguised as a gauche Irish barman. Your kiss will bring forth a prince, gracious and eloquent. Plus, I can open two bottles at once with one hand. Be the eighth light tonight in The Seven Stars.’ Never. There were no adventures. Nothing happened. It didn’t matter. The true joy was imminence. In the corridors of the Underground currents of balmy air, zephyrs from paradise, fondled my hair and on the escalator up to the lurid night a warm breeze caressed the face I turned towards advertisements for lingerie and new plays, guarantors of an end to the age of concealment, when the flesh and the spirit would both be revealed.
Michael Foley has published four novels, three collections of poetry and a collection of translations of French poetry. A new collection, Autumn Beguiles the Fatalist, is due from Blackstaff Press in late 2005 or early 2006.
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