Sleepless they crack no voice to tear air in rags. They slink in narrow circles and edge the walls. Their muscles twist and wait. Silence is cut by their knife-slice cries like elastic pulled to its stinging break. Cowed beneath their squall in the sky, we wander through streets leading down.
Gates melt past our eyes.
And walls shift like drapes. At last before us waits the slate sea flat in its bay like a trembling stone. Our feet touch the foaming of its tongue. These streets, steep stones, tiers laid on a cliff, shelves stacked up the chalk walls, are blunt white. They twist downward towards dizzier light, the liquid lap of radiant stiff sun-glare, water where gulls on poised wings dive, then climb sky to cut it apart until a violence of blue smarts our trailing eyes and the white sun stings.