The Skylight

It's the middle of winter, and I live in a basement, so I don't know why I am thinking of the summer we lived in that old attic suite, when you took your Sawzall and mallet and punched through the rafters and tar paper to cut a brilliant hole to the sky. I was weeding in the garden when you broke free, peeling back the rooftop like the lid of an old tin can. I saw the roof shudder and open, and there you were in the sunshine, covered with plaster dust and a century of squirrel dung, grinning.

Seamus Heaney never wanted a skylight.

But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open.
For days I felt like an inhabitant
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.
—The Skylight

Comments

[Michael J.]

Beautiful. I could draw an extended metaphor with my own life, but it would be too personal for blogging, or at least bad timing. Maybe when the snow melts. I feel the potential for extravagant sky, but right now it's winter, with some discontent, and there's work to do. To Providence I do drive, literally and figuratively.

[Turboglacier]

And on a non-metaphorical note, this reminds me of the hole in my roof, and the water that leaks in every time it rains, and the seeming hopelessness of ever fixing it, and the counter-entropic desperation of roofing in general. I'm thinking, now, maybe I should just get a sawz-all and enlarge the hole to a skylight...