Silence as in a fish tank;
life laps to the walls
but in here almost tangible;
in this unstirred air.
In the stained glass gloaming
of this cathedral,
conscious of my own presence;
senses magnified.
Size, minute
inside this architecture,
colossal within my own frame
as standing beneath the stars;
I am
infinitesimal but integral.
Sitting at the table,
it set
but no one else there.
Your eyes, too,
elsewhere,
or lost perhaps.
How small you look;
and still
how far you may see.
When the sea comes,
we will be ready
to turn from this lighted shore,
face the beacon perch,
draw ourselves into it
hauling ourselvbes along the string of pearls
that passes
to where the wind choirs rehearse.
Readers of this blog tend to be from foreign parts, but should there happen to be anyone from the vicinity of south Donegal looking in, you may be interested to know that Local Hands in Ballyshannon is hosting an evening of literary readings with interspesed music this friday evening, Culture Night, Fri 22nd. The event goes from 5pm to 8pm and features local poets and musicians; I expect to be reading in or around 6pm. Other readers include Olive Travers, Ted Hall, Roisín Lee, John and James McIntyre and members of Pen2Paper Writers Group from Donegal town.
Local Hands, which conveniently has my books for sale, will have information on their facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/LocalHands/
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| by Caspar David Friedrich |
Winter trees like old shipwrecks
sailed the winds;
hold those memories
close as the grain in their timbers.
Now defunct, the tips of their branches
scratch at the sky;
they stand, shaped to memory,
listless.
They had the genes,
they could embed them:
a dog’s hearing,
a cat’s dim-light vision,
dolphin’s echolocation;
they called them superpowers,
marketed them aggressively:
SUPERHUMANITY HAS ARRIVED.
They never admitted
that the brain cannot handle the sensitivity.
They never declared
test cases driven to madness,
sleep having become impossible,
nerves shattered, but advertised:
navigation skills of homing pigeons coming,
HUMAN FLIGHT ALMOST HERE.
A stone, a deadly bullet, flashed
from the wheel of a lorry
into the visor of my helmet,
driving it hard onto my nose.
Speeding to Tipperary on motorbike;
it would have smashed my face;
the bike, careering, would have dragged
my body; legs and arms breaking
in impossible angles,
jacket ribboning, a grotesque melange
of cloth and blood-sopped flesh.
By that thickness or the grace of the Gods,
I am the Michael I take for granted;
by such margins, we presume.
Strange to say, those memories are barely more than water now;
fluid, indistinct, and always rushing away from me;
that they were ever more is immaterial, I am not who I was.
I do, of course, acknowledge that you have been part of that change,
and for the good, I have not forgotten your part, and I am thankful.
But I have difficulty remembering you. Your face refuses to settle,
more or less as water spills, it refuses to fix in my mind;
your voice comes and goes, otherworldly and faint, like a signal on the shortwave.
More strikingly though, your spirit has become remote from me;
not by choice, but with the passing of time, the mountain of featureless days
that I’ve kicked up behind me, the dust of accumulated years between us;
distance has anaesthetised me; I no longer remember the feeling of you being here.
Picking plums from the branches of the clouds,
berries from the blue of the sky.
Dew-jewelled blades of grass doused my feet
while fir cones listened to my every step;
a tree of apples blushed and lit the field;
I shook hands with the leaves of a thousand trees.
The wind combing the grass silver,
tossing the heather;
the humours of the sky,
scowls and laughter,
tracing the mountainside’s contours,
a hunt at full gallop
through the gap.
The duns and greens, bright yellows
flitting light and shade,
carrying the atlas of the sky
over the gushing streams,
the ravines, the bracken meadows;
the exhilaration, fluid mosaic,
Donegal to Ballybofey.
I draw the music from my arm,
it expands like an opening wing;
I extend what I cannot speak
nor hand over,
an iridescence of sound
that all but aches to be free.
When there is no way to convey
the beauty that is within you,
loneliness is the sentence.
Should I write a poem about you;
skin-tight,
revealing like a bathing suit
or a big coat
to keep you hidden
or warm.
Would you even like it,
my written portrait;
I stray into Francis Bacon mode.
Perhaps leave those bones unstirred;
maybe I should write about hands,
how they colour in Winter weather.
Napalm.
Nice to feel the sun on my back,
to idle the whole day through;
watch girls passing along the beach,
thier beautiful tanned bodies.
Nice too, the sounds of the seaside:
a speed-boat buzzing out on the water,
the tide washing onto the strand,
the screaming children.
Spent all evening alone on the strand
watching a storm’s elbows resting on the horizon,
but now its shoulders are rising.
Once, God’s eye was the centre of every storm;
I feared the Himalayan masses of His charcoal-coloured anger;
they throw the earth to its knees.
The sea, wearing requiem black, is a writhing mass,
the birds have all disappeared down a hole
and the cattle in the fields are humming nervously to themselves.
I can feel a stinging in the molecules of the air
as the clouds roll in on the wheels of their blue undersides,
coming, rumbling over distant rocks, coming.
I must hurry, lock myself away, shiny bright conductor that I am.
I must dig myself a burrow;
hide myself from the war-making God of the sky.
Morning.
Stretches her arm back to touch him,
his bed-warmed skin;
expecting the familiar response,
his finger down her backbone.
Touching marble; taut, cold;
her brain struggling to climb
to her hand’s discovery;
and turn; can she?
Morning.
It was a morning she knew might come
but the indifference of the stone shocked her;
turn; there is never a choice;
mercifully, his eyes were shut.
