Close as a backyard garden, the desk at the corner of a long room, you can almost touch the Irish Sea on the train from Coleraine to Derry. Surging layers of white on white. A swerve and we’re barreling towards farmhouse, cliff and church, past Castlerock and Bellarena and into a double black tunnel. The train wobbles and jolts away from the sea. A shaggy raven alights on driftwood. Downhill Station is brown-beige and six shades of green. Blue-pink horizon, one farm after another and another.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Through the dark hedges,
raven clears a path. Makes room
for the blind man’s cane.

A grandmother with a pixie-cut the color of milk. Her lips curled in a half-smile. She knits — black angora interlaced with pink spangles — in lockstep with the train’s rhythmic wobble. Her granddaughter twirls the skien’s long tail. Across from them two brothers talk about yesterday’s bombing at Guildhall Square. The work of unorganized ruffians, they hypothesize.

“Much less trouble since they built the Peace Bridge over the River Foyle,” says the youngest. He offers a copy of The Sentinel to the grandmother, who has quit knitting to stare at the restless incoming tides. “I think of a giant origami when I cycle over the bridge. It’s like I’m flying through a strand of DNA.”

After war you hear
young brothers chattering
while folding paper. Songs.