Above the blue-bleak priest the bright-blue fisher hovers.

The priest notes the book upon the table, the lamp beside the book.

A towering Babel of papers still to grade, and that faraway look

as once more the mind begins to wander. Ah, to creep beneath the covers

of the belled bed beckoning across the room. He stops, recovers,

takes another sip of bitter tea, then winces as he takes another look

at the questions he has posed his students and the twists they took

to cover up their benighted sense of Latin. The fisher hovers

like a lit match closer to him. The windows have all been shut against

the damp black Dublin night. After all these years, his collar chokes

him still, in spite of which he wears it like some outmoded mark

of honor, remembering how his dear Ignatius must have sensed

the same landlocked frustrations. Again he lifts his pen. His strokes

lash out against the dragon din of error. The fisher incandesces in the dark.