Then the Night

The tweets collected below form an occasional if loosely structured series. They are generally composed late at night and it is difficult, in any given case, to rule out some degree of impairment on the part of the author. The attentive reader will also discern certain formal and thematic recurrences.

[These are drunk tweets. They’re basically all the same. — Ed.]

Then the night. The coming and going to a gull-dark quiet. The rain seeping under itself. The grey, the unconditional grey.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) January 26, 2013

Then the night. The sour heat of the old comforts. The piecing together of light in dreams. The failed constellations.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) January 27, 2013

Then the night. The mirrors sleek with selves and shadows; the silvering margins of the body, the rich skin of darkness, waiting.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) February 17, 2013

Then the night. The hymns and elixirs; the body enchanting itself. The slow methods of predation. The way nothing comes.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) March 2, 2013

Then the night. The pawing of the old ground, the white roots of what you were. The deep Saturdays, the lost perfect, the promise.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) March 2, 2013

Then the night. Low colours burned to a sweetness; to iodine and filthy ochre. The bath of silvers, the screen showing itself to the dark.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) March 31, 2013

Then the night. The cities we held from the rummaging evil. The collapsible beds; the making of arrangements. The way we were.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) April 1, 2013

Then the night. The comfort of what we were. The blue, unconditional days. The grass kneeling in the sweet wind. The simplicity of running.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) April 7, 2013

Then the night. The idea of constellations. Our stitches and trinkets bright on the unscratched distance. Our somehow proximate stars.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) April 24, 2013

Then the night. A low jet troubling the roof of sleep. That colossal scrape and throb. The purpled darkness, the silence repairing itself.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) May 18, 2013

Then the night. The massed sweetness of June. The violet, skin-warm darkness, the lush tissue of scent. The closeness, the clotted wanting.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) June 2, 2013

Then the night. The summer darkness spored and wing-laden. The sump of night colour, moth-brushed and hidden from the wind.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) June 21, 2013

Then the night. The delirium of swifts, folded somehow in a vertex of clay. The shrugged heat, the discarded fragrance. The summer.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) June 29, 2013

Then the night. The fix of wishlessness, the grey transfusion. And the lapse, at last. The sweetness beneath.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) August 22, 2013

Then the night. The slackening signal, the slow unbraiding of waves. Only the failing towers now. The dim, the useless noise.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) August 27, 2013

Then the night. The soft desertion of the swifts. The throng of diminishment. The greying.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) September 13, 2013

Then the night. The way falling works. Each leaf pencilled from nothing. The abscission tender somehow, and amounting to something.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) September 21, 2013

Then the night. The way age comes. Becoming weather to ourselves. Something that happens.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) September 28, 2013

Then the night. The hot blossoming of liquor. The spreading indelicacy.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) October 11, 2013

Then the night. The way perfect felt. The white bend of lily petals, the shadow raspberry lush. The dust that stains forever.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) October 27, 2013

Then the night. The slow dereliction. The becoming colourless. The way back home.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) November 16, 2013

Then the night. The holding together. The atom tenderness. The fire, all the way down.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) November 16, 2013

Then the night. What it comes down to. The dust and lacquer. The mint-bright interchange. And the lights, always, witnessing everything.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) December 7, 2013

Then the night. A rain slower than love scenes. A rain that sleeps and waits for stone.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) February 2, 2014

Then the night. The prelude and the fugue. The tissue of everything, glittering and close. The holding still. The light.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) February 9, 2014

Then the night. The cleanness after weather. The salt bright places without us, the world not even heartbroken.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) February 14, 2014

Then the night. Your heat in the convent fields. Your weightlessness in the summer grass. The colour of what's gone.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) February 16, 2014

Then the night. The zodiac heat, the weathered constellations. The darkness full of machine code and honey.

The sweetness, the sweetness.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) May 17, 2014

Then the night. The fibres sweet from you. The cinnamon and ethylene, and the songs still coming. Over the Samsung, over the summer water.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) June 5, 2014

Then the night. The air scratched and seed-threaded. The fret noise after spilled heat. The condition of waiting.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) June 20, 2014

Then the night. The flight noise gone when you listen for it. The scrawled diminuendo. And everything coming down to this.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) July 27, 2014

Then the night. The summer abandoned already, the pulse gone whisper dry. And us with our thin wrists, with veins that were always there.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) August 14, 2014

Then the night. The sweetness at last. Deep when it comes, and slow like slide guitar; like rust and honey.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) October 25, 2014

Then the night. The diminished third, the rest unequal to the noise. Our notes tied in the shallow sump of quiet, in the white between.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) November 1, 2014

Then the night. The toys abandoned in beloved heaps. Our selves unticking; the silvered increments, the slowing lurch of tin.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) December 12, 2014

Then the night. The motorway, when you close your eyes. The chord of washed noise, crossing the edge of everything.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) March 5, 2015

Then the night. The beauty equal to its particular darkness.

The beauty always equal.

1948 – 2015

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) March 13, 2015

Then the night. The afterness of flying always. The self still tender and unzoned. Somewhere grey and subarctic, parallel to sleep.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) April 5, 2015

Then the night. The meticulous reduction of rain. The studied panes; slurred to lapses of indigo, to careful tears of bronze.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) April 11, 2015