If I tell you something Leah, can you keep a secret?" Conor pressed a callused finger across a petroglyph of a deer like a blind man etching memory into his brain.

Three is a sacred number. Some say it represents the trinity or three layers of the soul.

Poem after poem after poem is the heartbeat of the human race.

In the midst of a hive of customers and clerks, a small boy with blond hair neatly parted on one side stares up into the face of a bronze sculpture. It is Cuchulainn himself---the warrior light. The Hound of Coolan lashed to a boulder with spear drawn. But The Hound is leaning to one side and dying in a public hall of the Dublin Post Office.

The pub door swings open when a man enters. A window of moonlit sky and sea illuminates the darkened pub, and a surge of cold ocean air charges its way inside. It's as if Cuchulainn's raging soul had passed through the doorway.

Marooned by all but one of his new disciples, the busker complete his act unfazed. The perfumed air seems to be replaced by a faint electrical smell like ozone after a lightning strike. When the man becomes a sterling tableau in the setting sun, Leah stares into his unblinking moonstone eye.

Where does it lead, this rockrose path?

I have always said that a picture book is a palace for a poem. I still believe that.

The sun is setting in a burnt orange sky; the cliffs are black silhouettes; the sea, liquid silver.