Trees

Trees keening winter nights away,
their wails woven into the wind;

heads of hair like seaweed taken from the strand,
flails knotted in insoluble puzzles.

Underground, roots twisting toward some source
shaped by memory;

trees like abandoned lovers,
scratching down the marble of night-time.

Don’t say too much

or you’ll give it away.

Peter Doig’s paintings are poetic; magical, mysterious, beautiful and different. Canoes and boats feature a lot, it's a good choice: figures isolated on the water,  going to God knows where,while the interface of water and air introduces the notion of an alternative world.

His six characters in ‘Figures in Red Boat’ are suspended between something horribly grotesque and perfect serenity, the explained and the unexplained, this world and some other. They look lost and it’s interesting that the figure on the left seems to be seated outside the boat. An exotic landscape is suggested in the background, but it might be mist; there is sunlight on the figures in a dim grey setting.

Was there a bloody accident, leaving six people somewhere beyond life? Is this a boat into the next world?

Mirage-like; ambiguous and disturbing, it leaves me wanting to write about it; but what? It’s quite brilliant.

I am weave

I am weave,

flows bare bones of the land,

roots, blood my stealth;

streams mountain hair,

hillsides’ ruminations,

meadow fantasies;

bleaches sunlight,

sugars earth,

rips the seas’ tides;

calls clockwork from branches,

buries bones in soil, drags days behind,

stirs the year.

Writer’s block

Nothing lands on this plain;

nothing moves

but its seeping emptiness.

Goggled pilot

high above

this snow-gagged wilderness,

loop or spin,

I leave no shadow;

the paper grins.

Swallows performed by Garonne

Elaine O'Dea's song Swallows performed by Elaine and Elisabeth, together Garonne.

The Trees at the Rath*

Trees keening winter nights away,

their wails woven into the wind;

heads of hair like seaweed taken from the strand,

flails knotted in insoluble puzzles.

Underground, roots, twisting toward some source,

shaped by memory;

trees like abandoned lovers,

scratching down the marble of night-time.


* Fairy ring, fort

Meteorite

Meteorite

When the starlings were the full of the sky,

we stood, rooted, gob-smacked,

exhilarated beyond words,

knowing that no air-show

nor any natural phenomenon ever compared.

Next morning I opened the back door

to find a knot of feathers on the ground,

a starling as far from flight as could be imagined,

as dull as the stone

that once blazed an arc across the heavens.