Incidents at Naylor’s Cove

INCIDENTS AT NAYLOR’S COVE 

A duck flies past. 

The waves hissing 

Like a thousand cartoon serpents  

In advance fizzling like ten thousand 

Tinny sizzling cymbals in retreat. 

Our hero finds the most comfortable place in the cliff-face with a windbreak. 

Smoke rises & disperses. 

One, then two robins come & check out the beach, sand sticking then spilling from their claws as they walk along, their ribboned legs like calcified worms. 

The once again curious abscence of seagulls is noted. 

Distant scenes of glassy shipless sea; horizonal cobalt; gorse-in-outbreak on Bray Head; misty Howth Hill & environs are noted. 

Entering swiftly from the Northern Flank a real athlete of a rat hovercrafts across the roughly midground sand & pebbles. 

Then disappears like rats do. Slinky things. 

Whimsical delusions of Victorian swimmers escaping old photographs & emerging exuberant from the waves on 19th Century holiday. 

Of locating that buried wreck of a platform & riding steam-train to 1880. 

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Incidents at Naylor’s Cove is from my collection Medium. Naylor’s Cove is a tiny beach at the foot of Bray head where I spent much of the Pandemic. Back in Bray’s heyday as a Victorian holiday destination Naylor’s Cove had its own railway station.