A Moment of Brilliance

 

She has a delicate face;

casts her eyes downward;

I noticed her mascara;

her eyes would be the brighter for it.

I saw the crescent of her eyelashes,

the curve of her cheek;

she was not speaking then

and did not know I was looking at her.

I was slightly behind

and to one side,

and formed an opinion

based on that view alone.

I fell in love

based on that view alone:

the delicacy of her fine-boned face,

her downcast eyes.

To me, they spelt gentleness or fragility.

In life, there are a few occasions that are urgent,

that are, like the lighting of a match,

brilliant flashes.

On a park-bench

 

On a park-bench, listening to the sound of leaves falling,

he became, suddenly, aware of the sound of heartbeat inside

his chest. The lub-dub of valves closing, then of the flow of

blood through those chambers, out into the arteries, and

around the labyrinthine vessels of his body.

The city silenced, the traffic that had flowed along the three

sides of the park now stationary, he was aware of himself

being present as he had never been to himself before.

Among falling Autumn leaves, a man sits in a state I’d almost

call ecstasy while the city growls continuously around him.

Razor Wire

 

She said,

I must wear my pain like razor wire,

but when you see me,

you fail to look beyond the wire.

When I say, I live deeper,

come join me, you’ll enjoy it;

you make it a fence;

you wear my pain like razor wire.

The Finest Poem

 

Spare:

the page.

‘How do I

fill such a space?’

a question to no one,

and no one answers.

Maybe the space is

the finest poem,

the infinite idea;

the poem

that dreamed itself

into being.

into being.

Zaknthos

 

Faraway the sea was a night-time city.

I stood unsteady, too much wine;

faraway the sea was shining in the moonlight.

Closer, by my hand in fact, a string of lights

on a clothes line,

a string of lights like a harbour-front on a Greek island.

Zaknthos, but that’s years ago;

the restaurants down by the harbour,

people passing in droves, waves of warm night humour,

boats jangling

and a quartet playing its way up and down the strip,

bouzouki music to clinking glasses.

My legs gone to rubber,

recent rain reflecting light from watching shrubs;

I would have sung, but it was far too cold.

Happy Christmas. 

An Ending That Isn't

 

Your life in all its magnificent capacity

to imagine and dream, plan, remember,

learn and know, create, innovate, love,

be so vital to so many, care and give,

support, achieve, fix, build, persevere;

now, today, reduced to the gruelling task

of maintaining a flow of air into the bellows

of your lungs.

Stop.

A bellows maintains a fire; it has no purpose otherwise,

and your breathing has no purpose now.

Rest.

Rest, let us continue;

we will carry you on.

Trees

 

Dark on this side, silver-white on the western

and seeming to bend under the weight of sunlight,

but, like beech leaves closing their palms,

the branches curve away from the wind.

The intricacy of trees exposed in December,

belying an apparent haphazardness,

here there’s a consistent angle in a tree’s branching,

there an upward sweep of branch-endings.

Beyond, topping the hills, now hay and rust coloured,

are windmills, Calvary-stark against the winter sky,

and they too harvesting energy, trees as we would design

them; spare and artless.

Going Places

 

That way, Ballybofey;

that way, Donegal.

Across the Bluestack mountains, Glenties;

to the east, Castlederg.

But in the direction I’m pointing: Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Draco;

the faraway places, the intimate places;

places I’ve dreamt of,

places I’ve taken refuge.

Roads that arrive,

more that never do

criss-cross

that plain.

I’ve hitch-hiked

since a boy;

those roads are straight and endless,

and take you

not to where you want,

but to where you need.

 

Love makes a meteorite

of lovers,

their world its trail.

What brilliance;

what a zenith!

Part of us dies

 

The fields told their stories

over the walls, through the thorns;

whispered their secrets to silver roads

who, humming like telegraph wires,

carried them to the neighbouring parishes.

Stories that hung dancing on rowan trees

or carried lanterns into the earth;

some were left to simmer in springs

or sent burbling down into silt-filled ponds;

many still mark the earth like ringworm.

Ours, the kith and kin of Garrypat, Bully’s Acre,

Páirc an Easa; that mosaic of landscape,

familar, once, as our parents’ faces,

whose stories, our stories, are no longer heard

but are lost under the roar of passing traffic.

Alone, together,

 

Alone, together,

it seems we all remember our deaths.

Could never be everything to each other

no matter how great the love,

knowing too well the solitude coming.

Forgive me.

Landscape

 

Lifting the cup to your mouth,

I see the old water courses, dry;

parched ridges, infertile now;

desiccated trunks and limbs, forests once;

the semi-submerged human habitations

hazy behind the skittering dust dervishes

that haunt the place.

I would kiss your hands.

Her Gentleness

 

         

Her gentleness was healing.

Friends came when they were low;

she lifted them

back into their heavens

to twitter and wheel,

smile down at her.

Down to where,

watching over their worries,

she gazed up,

encouraged, smiled back at them;

spent her childhood

                 longing for their wings.

My Advice This November Day

Don’t be too fond of owning,  my little love.

As you fly;
let your head be full of the magic of flying
and happiness will be yours.
Be light as a leaf  among the millions;
such exhilaration!

This flight is your life, darling;
unique, incredible, finite.

Question

“What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in you hand
Ah, what then?”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems

Let’s drink to that.

"Need we say it was not love,

Just because it perished?”

― Edna St. Vincent Millay

We left through the same door we entered;

the seasons had moved along.

Neither of us turned to look,

the door was already closed.

Other people will stop there: a month, a year;

in our different worlds, let’s drink to that.

 

Unhappiness recreated your face

in myriad facets, as in a cubist painting.

The disarray made it ugly, but alive,

and that was another beauty.

Rain Fell

 

Rain fell.

It was not a dream,

but your voice

from the far side of the years,

sounding like sunlight on water.

If only I was prepared,

if I’d known such a thing could happen,

I would have walked out

to meet you.

Emigration

 

She went on a liner; we waved and waved and cried.

The ship’s horn blasted out its great bulky voice

and moved away from the quay. We watched her face

till it was indistinct, her frame till it was indistinct,

the throng of passengers hanging over the rail till they

were indistinct, the ship diminishing in size slowly slowly,

till no more than a dot on the horizon, and then it was gone.

I looked at the great emptiness that is the ocean;

it was the same emptiness she was leaving behind her.

Not such a death for her with the warming promise of her future,

but the saddest for us who watched her diminish like a birth rescinded.

November Poetry

 

In the park, the leaves of another year have turned

to rust, fallen, rotted and been cleared.

The flower bed at the centre of the lawn is bare,

as is the children’s playground; the coffee-room

is boarded up and a film of water has darkened the colour

of everything: tree trunks, foot-paths, benches.

November’s beauty is not great splashes of primary colour

nor nature’s pretty embellishments, but the textures

that lie beneath them, even the lowered sun throwing

shadows from the unevenness of the ground.

My mind too is shaded by November.

Less distracted by obvious beauties, I search with narrower eye

among the austere denuded trees for patterns

of growth along their barks, of bud-beading,

of the varying strategies in the splay of limbs to capture sunlight.

I have a more artful eye, that bends more quickly to deeper thoughts,

turning sod and light inwards; 

I rework the detritus of the passing year, 

work those textures into words.

Blank White

The oblong page: blank, white;

I turn it ninety degrees searching for inspiration,

catch sight of you at a side window;

note you do not wave.

But, seeing the exotic landscape behind you,  

a renaissance backdrop,

I decide, bird of paradise, to fly there, 

flare among the branches.

Vacuous occupation, the page declares;

look here, here is your reflection.

Waving

 

It was not the wave from the door, but,

when she’d turned out of the gate, looking back,

mother was still there with a second wave,

that, like an exchange of vows, was love

declared, over and over, with the simplest gesture.

Great milestones of her life started there;

her ever-growing steps towards independence,

all blessed with that wave, a warm pullover of love

to wear wherever the steps were going; and knowing too

that those achievements were always tinged with sadness.

Emptied

 

Emptied.

The house.

Home.

Gone.

Those years.

That life.

Numb.

The walls.

Myself.

Fork in the Road

 

Page:

a confessional, a dilemma;

what will I say

dear blankness?

Somehow a page is too white to be truthful,

and fiction is a betrayal;

every time I confront the white page,

I 'm at the fork in the road before honesty.

Life

 

A stone skimmed across the water pauses a moment

to imagine wings.

In the same moment a mayfly, among half a million

wings flickering golden sunlight,

is gathered into the jaws of a granite-speckled trout.

A man in an artist’s workshop is studying the camed

window of a mayfly’s wing, marvelling at its beauty

at the same moment; the trout’s teeth crushes the wings

that flickered golden sunlight.

The stone sinks.

At Lough Eske

 

I am part of a lake becalmed. Sitting here, oak woods my collar,

feet paddling November leaf litter, mind deep in the reflection

of tree trunks; further out, the tracery of their ash grey branches

grading to the cumulus ruminations of an overcast Donegal sky.

I am among those branches, an intricacy of neurons, still as a blackbird

considering the world from a height; song silent now, but full inside;

I am among those trunks, quiet nimble-eyed fox peering out from shadows,

brimming with the present but with only the faintest gleam off my scales.

The Walls of Inis Oirr

Among Ireland's most beautiful and impressive sights are the limestone walls of Inis Oirr. Fields paved with  karst limestone cleared to a labyrinthine landscape that's just incredible to behold. The walls for the most part fall into two categories of construction: lace walls and Feiden walls. You can get a good description of these walls at https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-stone-walls-of-ireland.html

The Walls of Inis Oirr

How these walls speak, like poetry, of the land and its people;

how carefully the stones, like words, chosen to fit,

how beautiful their construction, coloured to their place.

The stone that paved the fields, now brimming with sky;

the lace walls of Inis Oirr, nets for seaweed fertiliser,

alive with limestone clouds chasing powder blue patches

across stanzas laden with western light, air and water.

Or feiden walls with their tightly packed words leaning left,

then right; words rhyming with themselves and their landscape;

for all the world, like a singsong on a bus coming late-night from

the pub, as close to merry as ever a poem could ever be, and still

following the lilt of the land as Yeats might have dreamed it.

Dog-eared Memory

 

Your face distorted

through the rain-running glass;

shop lights

flowing down your hair and shoulders;

the harsh neons,

the dull tungsten tea-coloured;

Main Street mermaid circa 1967,

the town a cascading shawl.

When I search through the files,

the dog-eared memories; thumb right through

to the darkest corners of my mind,

that’s all I can find of you.

When Snow is Melting

 

When the snow is going,

time is melting;

think deforming clocks.

Spoons stretching their necks

into slime thin slimness

craning downwards,

examining where to

drop

with silver spherical absorption

and cup hooks

with feelings, straining

to hold onto water.

Speaking to Alzheimer's

 

When words fail,

sing;

magnet

for all those filings,

splintered thoughts;

sing the lasso

of a familiar song,

draw in those fond memories

together.

At her Dying

 

In memory of my mother

What to say, what words to pick;

words so freely scattered, now

that she was breathing fitfully, within

minutes of leaving her life,

leaving those she loved for the love

she had prayed all her days,

and these words, if she could hear,

the last words she would ever hear.

How we struggled to find a way of saying

we love you, be happy to be journeying,

approaching the God of her life-long devotion.

How to put love, comfort, encouragement

into uncertain, dismayed voices;

to put words that were special from us to her.

Her breathing weaker now, and our voices

hopefully reaching through the fog in her head;

our voices the last sounds before her space-travel.

What words to send with her, if they could be heard;

our company to the threshold, and beyond;

warmth to carry into the unknown.

Spears of Mountain Grass

 

Spears of mountain grass bronze tipped

and edged, grading to gold, to green;

tufts splayed like ceremonial headdresses,

gleaming in the already golden sunlight,

resplendent.

Bowled over by the glories I’d missed,

with narrower eye, I see patches of azure sky

along the track, yellow-green grasses combed

smooth by rushing flood water in culverts,

silver-glinting mica in the siding rocks,

magnificent.

Beneath the mountains, the rain-reflected gleam

of low sun into my eyes is a celebration

of the bejewelled growth along the wayside,

the play of light, water and mountain breezes

dizzying, fire-working my senses into exhilaration,

and profound joy.

Ambition

 

Love found us sleeping with multiples

of ourselves

as we divined

all of us that we are, strove towards

all we could be,

and, imagining the best we could never be,

endeavoured to be those too.

It Blurs

 

What I didn’t expect:

it all blurs.

What a rare ol’ time it was:

blurred;

what closeness:

blurred;

what excitement:

blurred.

How tight we were;

what nights we had;

what we wouldn’t have done;

what we wouldn’t have done for each other;

it blurs;

all of it blurs.

Deforestation

 

Deforestation:

another cancer-ridden lung,

its blackening tissue,

from the air,

ugly as any tumour,

as aggressive a cancer

as would cause any patient

to stop.

Sense Action Being

 

Tiger rests, tongue slakes flames,

zen-like in shadow patch

beneath over-arching fronds;

when earshot goes click,

eyesight opens in coin flick,

Tiger, sunlight in leaves,

silent on padded paws

muscle tide carpeted,

sense, action, being, crouched

in cave opening of eyes;

springs sheltered beneath fangs

gush bright silver streams,

Tiger turns dreamy.

Imagining

 

imagine

the dim muddy sunlight that filters into lake water

imagine

those perfectly round, olive green leaves drifting by

trailing their spiralis stems behind them

imagine

bubbles here and there rising like nascent stars innately

aware of the presence of sky

imagine

in that place, a man drifts by, a ripple of life with a vague light

from half open eyes

imagine

his love similarly, lying on his back as they flow, her eyelids

heavy like his

imagine

the depth’s silence caressing their bodies with luxurious density

imagine

their eyes see you as they pass, but regard you as incidental as

any sight along their way

imagine 

that oneness, close your eyes and think of it

Wooden Posts

 

Two wooden posts, maybe five metres apart,

driven into the ground near the edge of a moor,

a desolate, wild expanse;

the connecting fence long since gone.

Two estranged lovers

standing at the edge of each others’ company,

maintaining their rigid positions

in vast pointlessness.

Home Cinema

 

How magical it all was:

all of us gathered in the sitting-room,

watching every moment of the setting up

of screen and projector, the reels fitted

into place, lights turned off, then click

and whirr and our own cinema,

the impossible happening before our eyes.

Now, cine-camera, projector and screen,

most likely broken, taking up space in our attic;

a few reels of film tossed in a box, unseen

by anyone for many years.

And those faces, blurred behind grainy footage

and jumpy camera-work: dead, long dead

most of them; before our children’s memories.

Ah, old magic, even I won’t risk seeing them again.

Arrogance

 

Misplaced and crass,

worn like plate armour

by a man who'll pass

completely, 

almost as quickly

as his breath on glass.

Half a Greeting Card

 

Between the leaves of a book, I find half a greeting card;

the picture, not the message.

The book has been a long time untouched,

but the card has stirred something; I cannot remember;

was it put there to remember?

The years pass, the books collect on the shelves,

here and there marked with tokens from our lived lives;

moments we once considered worth marking,

now lost among the abandoned books,

the millions pages past.

A Bright Night Blue

 

Blue,

bright night blue,

painted evenly across the sky.

A moon’s yellow halo low above the dunes,

smooth undulating dunes,

or lovers, perhaps:

smooth curved backs of lovers

in a lamp’s yellow halo,

and the slow shift of sand grains

along night’s gentle breezes

or the slow drift of lovers

along their gentle breathing.

Your Photograph

 

The photograph on the wall has turned blue;

I can’t remember the original colours,

and the image is turning into fog.

I’d forgotten what year you died;

a few years ago, I assumed,

then I was told it was  fifteen.

A person dies; you thrash around in the memories;

finally a day arrives and you’re not remembering,

then more days pile in.

My memory of you is turning blue;

I have forgotten the original colours,

and you are turning into fog.

Roots and Beauty

 

The roots must beg in the shit and mud,

among the carcasses and the decomposed;

spindling whiskers around grains holding

water tight as briefcases of money; feeling

with pin-sized tips their way through

snake-pit of competitors; tunelling eyeless

to regurgitate eternally life’s slop.

To break through to the light in multi-armed

resplendence like  Hindu Gods; their fanned

out canopies of leaves and blossoms: glorious;

beauty like swans above the water-line,

a million miles removed from their subterranean 

engine-rooms.

She Carried the Sun

 

Every droplet of rain is a droplet of sunlight;

the windows are a million suns flowing down;

light is shining from under our feet, from the roofs

and pavements, streets and windscreens.

Then you pass, and as nets might overflow with fish,

you hair is sunlight right down to backs of your knees.

This is a memory.

A momentary event like a meteorite crossing the sky

which I have elevated to sacredness in my mind,

for a mind needs its torches,

it needs its flares.

Meeting at Nursing Home During the Pandemic

I must make an appointment

though we set the pendulum of our lives;

I must meet you through glass

though our breathing was one;

I must talk across a distance

though our words and breath were one;

I must put my hand to the glass

though happiness was the heat of your skin;

I must go away

though you are my home.