It was late. I was in my room above Botany Bay, the cherry blossoms below hidden in darkness, the windows two black rectangles against the night. I faced a page of quantum mechanics, the equations spilling down the sheet in ordered progressions of uncommon logic. I was trying to understand some intractable movement from one line to another and stared at the page, puzzled. Quite suddenly, I grasped it, the elegant equations coming into clarity, then dissolving in front of me. It was as if I had glimpsed for a moment beyond the numbers and symbols to the luminous totality of the reality beneath, the intricate structure at the base of everything opening like a door onto a passageway that I didn't know existed. I came back to my senses and the room, dazed and changed. The cherry blossoms still swayed below, there yet concealed in darkness, hiding their daylight brilliance, like the world I had just encountered, fleeting but actual – and everything I had known to be certain, questioned.
Noel Duffy lives in Dublin. His debut collection In the Library of Lost Objects (Ward Wood Publishing, 2011) was shortlisted for the 2012 Strong Award for best First Collection by an Irish poet. His second collection, On Light and Carbon is forthcoming from Ward Wood.