Water

 

Water

Water held my face;

the wind tried to steal it.

A fish jumped,

I had a brainwave:

why don’t you and I

make our home in the water?

First Days Away

 

Those first days away from home,

in a city with nowhere to go, knowing no one,

and no one to expect you at any place, any time

created an almost dizzying disconnectedness,

an unsettling emptiness; perhaps it felt like a lobotomy.

Alcohol was an easy decision: a place to hang out,

a reason to be there; alcohol would fill the hours,

dispel the loneliness. The hubbub of a bar was a vision of living;

though one was alone,  a rock in a stream, for a while it felt like living,

and later, when the isolation began to drill your brain,

the alcohol would take you away, tuck you up in oblivion.

Crow Speak

 

A crow, high up on the wires,

a knot of night-time

grumbling this last fifteen minutes;

gabbling inside his feathers

obscenity-filled arguments;

a vituperative stream.

Fagots of words issuing fluently,

from the throat behind his horny beak,

a language long hidden beneath the cloak

of feather and pitch;

a communication with the sky

as present and natural as weather.

Burren

 

Burren

The hard skin, we walked,

to the clouds,

and from the clouds to the sea,

and out to the lighthouse.

A country with no boundaries

between land and water,

nor land and sky,

nor past, nor future.

God lives in a cave,

God lives on the mountain,

God and the devil

living among others of their own kind.

We walked the pavements,

among living shadows;

they held out their hands;

their hands sang.

We saw, in water-filled hollows,

ourselves: air, rock and light,

transient and eternal;

cloudscapes, not people.

Midget Man

 

I give you midget man:

the mite with purpose.

I give you the inexplicable

workings of a miniaturised brain;

the repetitious trawl of a mind

across one, same, vacant square.

I pass onto you the question:

what possible purposes

can a zig-zagging corpuscle of life

have:

the conundrum of protoplasm,

slime, albeit contained,

having somewhere to go?

September Swallows

 

Knots on wires uncurling:

crochets escaping staves,

commas punctuation.

September swallows,

avionics engaged,

suddenly frenzied

as though their true selves,

too long furled,

must hone their aeronautics:

wheel, swoop, sweep;

for tomorrow

they will trace lines of longitude.

Grief

 

Along the edge of your grieving

is the wind’s voice,

that snags and flitters on the sloe;

blooming rags that flicker

through the hollows of your nights,

rummaging through your memories.

And, when the scouring is done,

dawn’s eye, dry as weathered bone,

will come, find you, nail you to its eternity.

 

So narrow in his thinking,

he could never grasp an opposing view.

Always right, looked down on opposition;

was ever a man so disabled?

Ignorance, a black bag over his head;

how vigorously his arrogance grew in darkness.

Lop-sided Song

 

Tipsy,

singing your lop-sided song

with uncertain voice,

as though notes were ice,

while all the time dancing

on unsteady feet.

A song

smothers in technique;

but you found its soul

and set it free;

you’ve never known, but

I loved you most just then.

A New House

 

I moved house recently, this will be my last. Not suggesting that I’m moving on any time soon, but the house itself has strong echoes of the transitory. Its name, Bedeque, refers to a red-bricked street off Belfast’s Crumlin Road which disappeared in the seventies; the stone was taken from Enniskillen’s old railway station.

There was a time, when travelling on holidays, we’d be looking out for the first glimpse of the ocean; daily now, it’s our first view of the outside world as we look out over Rossnowlagh, across Donegal Bay towards St John’s Point, Killybegs and Sliabh League. The view through the dormer window has something of those old seafaring novels, I almost expect to see a galleon moored in the bay, but, actually it’s empty, the trawlers coming and going from Killybegs are hidden by St John’s long finger.

What I do see is the play of sunlight on the water, ever-changing as the cloudscapes are ever-changing in this part of the world. Glittering circles, burnished bronze; brilliant white streaks; silver-grey stripes; colours, that defy nomenclature, existing for seconds only, then passing with a puff of wind.

Some days the mountains are one with the sea, some days with the sky, sometimes all are one, lost in low stratus cloud, as empty a nowhere as anyone has ever seen. But the greatest glories come with the setting sun, spectacular at the end of August; red like the ambient glow on the cinema screens of my childhood, suggesting, as the old films did, mysterious, exotic worlds just beyond those wild impenetrable mountains.

And then, in darkness, the lighthouse and beacon lights across the bay; the house lights, street lights; the transience of our lives so much more appreciable in the miniaturisation of distance, beside the vastness of the ocean, its permanence and its indifference; there is a beautiful melancholia attached to it all. Which brings me back to the transitory: Bedeque Street in Belfast, Enniskillen Railway station; maybe I’m getting carried away?

It’s all relative of course, glad I’m not a mayfly.