Reservoir

Before heading out to my cousin's place in Greystones I took Lola for a walk along the path beside the Stillorgan reservoir. I hadn't been there in decades, possibly not since the 1980s, when I climbed with a girl I fancied and we sat in a huge cypress branching over the wall, enacting the old, taunting playground rhyme: '...sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G...' The rest of the jingle, marriage and 'wheeling a baby's carriage' wasn't on the cards however and she went back to her boyfriend (he was a postman I recall, and I think his name was actually Pat).

The wall is still there, sporting some interesting graffiti, and so is the tree, just a little out of the frame to the left, though its large lower branches have lopped off, presumably to deter kids clambering over the wall. Longer ago, when the wall wasn't backed up by a spiked security fence, myself and teeneged friends used to do just that, climb over and sit on the neatly mowed grass: long, tangled conversations ephemeral (and, who knows, perhaps vital) as breath.

So the place is atmospherically dense, especially when it's damp, warm and lush with summery green, redolent of memory.

Ah, but there are bracing antidotes to these moony, melancholic daydreams, such as the perky, yellow graffiti-heads above, or this marvelous poem by Tony Hoagland. A good wake-up call.