“I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part of God.”
Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reclaiming
the occurrence of all things
in myself;
as close to God,
unfettered
as the free circulation of air;
being
as the sensations of all living
pass through me.
Inside himself,
that’s the silence.
He lived
away from us,
from our view;
a complete union
of person and soul;
an isolation
we observed
even in his company.
We thought him incomplete
in our ignorance.
When in ‘A Christmas Childhood’, Patrick Kavanagh writes,
“Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy’s hanging hill,
I
looked and three whin bushes rode across
The
horizon — the Three Wise Kings.”
I know exactly what he saw, me too one very clear crisp Christmas night, they were making their way in bright moonlight up the hill towards Scardaun not far from Roscommon town. I was astonished, they were so clearly outlined against the sky. God knows, they were a long way off course; with that sense of direction I'd recommend giving up following stars.
It was not hard for a child brought up on miracle-laden gospel stories, fairy stories, ghost stories, Celtic legends and Aesop’s fables to see three kings on the slope of a hill. With a lively imagination, a child might turn from the ghostly shadows in the corners of his bedroom to the distant horizon outside his window and know, categorically, that there are no borders; not between Heaven and Earth nor Ard Mhaca and Tombstone.
Sure, I watched for travelling stars at Christmas, and, come Good Friday, I expected the Heaven’s floor to be ripped open and God’s fury to be visited on the town in an horrific display of lightning bolts at exactly three o’ clock in the afternoon. Easter Sunday, I expected to see the beams of light radiate from between the clouds, the glory of God the Father extending out over the land.
In my childhood, the year was measured out in religious festivals, all of which had direct bearings on our lives. An apparition seemed to me to be a very likely event given the fact that our family said the rosary each night, and I was considered a shoe-in for the priesthood. I was petrified at the notion of God or Our Lady arriving into my bedroom full of flash and bang, and calculated at a very young age that my best chance of avoiding such an appalling possibility was to ditch the whole religion thing completely.
But the beauty of Kavanagh’s poem! He reminds us that the child of those days and that upbringing expected and saw the signs of Heaven in the world around him:
“The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven's gable”.
His retelling of a Christmas morning in which his father’s music sailed over the fields to the Lennons and Callans, clear as water, and further, way, way, away, to the universe where the stars themselves were dancing to his tune. How he hurried into his trousers to be out into that Christmas morning, into a world made magnificent with the
“winking glitter of a frosty dawn”.
How wonderful it is to have memories from home so magical; how pure that dream flowing down the years of growing. And when those years finally turned over, and the boy was a man, how could he leave Monaghan behind him; wasn’t there a perfection to the old life? Wasn’t the spirit of the child as pure and brilliant as that Christmas morning?
And how could I leave Roscommon behind, and the magnificence of those same pristine, frosty mornings still sparkling in my head. Those were the mornings that filled you with such unexpected happiness that you broke into a run, the only way to disperse the energy that was surging up inside you.
And then Christmas; no question as to the magic. If it was a sun-bright frosty morning, Heaven was already smiling. And as to the wonders of the day, of course, Santa could fit down a chimney; anyone who can circumnavigate the world in a sleigh pulled by a team reindeers can fit down a chimney. At about noon the smell of Uncle Brendan’s cigar kicked off the festivities, there was a jug of orange squash in the middle of the dinner table and the lights on the tree were the stars taken down from the sky.
Sure enough Adulthood and geography make Christmas something else; life changes everything. What was magical is rationalized and the excitements of childhood find some other vent. But the well of childhood continues to pour out its Christmas gifts; the memories that colour my mind make the day special despite those distances. I rise a little later, and there’s not quite the rush to get down to the sitting room, but the day blooms into happiness, and there’s that same celebration of being alive.
this way,
flesh pouring;
mouth agape,
teeth watching
there, there,
tumbling dice,
eyes unhitched,
plunging down
faster,
concaved cheeks
coil inward
to the perfect ohhhh
Collecting your warmth on the palm of my hand,
explorer of exotic landscapes,
brushing over the warm skin,
the shallow arc of your back;
closed eyes; the sunlit concave of a desert dune
among the sun-warmed backs of dreams.
Days: we grow into them,
eventually wear them snug;
you and I were different fits.
Days of mild disagreement
stacked one on the other
became disaffection;
passionate conflict
might have rekindled love
but ours were days of indifference;
we passed each other
without touching,
we went to sleep without a kiss.
Came a day when you said
you’d rather go out without me;
came the day when I did not care;
the day when you said
you’d rather live without me
and the day I did not care.
I have a memory:
two lovers lying in a meadow,
a cosmos of May flowers;
their laughter swishing them
round and around
a bee-buzzing ecstatic day.
High up swallows tracing circles,
lavish displays
of their mastery of the air;
they watch with fingers entwined;
swallows too,
magnificent in their flying.
She holds her child in her hands,
barely more than a basket of bones light as twigs.
I see the anguish in her face, and try to imagine
the weight of my starving child on my hands
but cannot; I cannot bear to put my child’s face
on that emaciated body.
I will not bear her suffering, not even in imagination;
maybe that is why such horrors persist.
Each discovery opens the door
To a room more empty.
Converging to a point,
and it bugle-shaped to infinity.
Stars make space in my head.
Standing flying,
The universe without within;
Minute, infinite
I.
Full sails once,
bulging with summer sunlight;
we would have gathered them in, eyes.
Geometries of whitened stone:
disused warehouses;
midday has lain down,
stretched out, listless beneath the walls.
Water that is lapping against the quay-side,
speak up;
what is the history of this place?
Part river:
play of current on bronzed pebble-beds,
sweet.
Part stone:
tapping waters in the sound boxes beneath boulders,
their back-beat.
Part waterweed:
the choir’s descants ascend to high C,
the shape of it.
Sopping fields
green with water,
lush drumlins
sluicing November rain
down their soused sumps,
spewing stone-coloured cloudscapes
onto the road,
coughing up sozzled fences
from beer-brown drains
to hobble under their load of time
tunelessly
into winter’s torpor.
Having arrived at my conclusion,
I embark upon a contemplation
of the issues.
Since there is nothing to consider,
I mull over them
and reach the decision
that my ruminations are futile,
that I have already fixed
on a resolution
and that considerable forethought
will be necessary
for the solution I require.
His face, a withering peach dried of happiness;
cares relentlessly tapping at his temples;
years spent yanking a livelihood from obstinate fields.
Still that skulking alertness, a hunger behind his eyes;
trigger-fast assessments, critical, begrudging;
observing the world with a lead-shot gaze.
The exertions of neighbours stored, bones for picking over
through interminable nights; nights that stack,
block upon block, building building hatred.
Let’s say, I was to walk out in public bent into this shape:
it would be concluded that I was a half-wit;
from posture alone!
And let’s say my hair is unkempt and
I’m wearing a big black overcoat, hanging open;
people would cross the road.
If, on the other hand, I retrieve a kitten from the depths of the coat:
they’ll consider me harmless, away in the head,
still better avoided.
And, with all of that, if I appear to be perfectly happy in myself,
I’ll be discounted as a pitiful poor soul,
hopelessly adrift from reality.
The house is a box.
I live in it,
like my skull,
among my things,
navigation markers
of my everyday.
Beyond the windows
chaos,
beautiful, daunting;
I gaze out,
make plans to negotiate it;
it stares back.
You, in stillness at the kitchen table,
in a melancholy slant of evening light,
gazing past the tableware
at life.
In that moment,
how monumental the tea things;
how infinitely small you;
how brittle life.
I'm looking forward to sharing a launching event with Caoimhin MacAoidh at this year's Allingham Festival. I'll be launching 'The Sound of Water Searching' and Caoimhin will be launching ‘Between the Jigs and the Reels’; a book, originally published in 1994, that has been out of print for a number of years. The event is part of the Allingham Festival in Ballyshannon and takes place on Nov. 6th in the Abbey Arts Centre at 2pm. Booker Prize nominee, Claire Keegan will be in conversation with Sinead Crowley following this event
Sometimes the sky runs through you:
a light-saturated blue, streamers of white cloud.
I’ve admired your free spirit, envied your lightness,
and tugged at my mooring ropes but found them firm.
No doubt, this vision of you reflects intangibility:
I may as well be grabbing at falling snow.
But still, I tell myself, that all I can be and all I can know
is extracted on the threshing floor of my mind.
Here is time,
a jacket hanging on a nail.
And here is sunlight,
dumped on the disused counter.
Here is its shadow
slashed down a wall.
And here silence
in the amnesia of unstirred air.
Here is an eternity
even ghosts have abandoned.
A tree, choreographing its own movements,
has curled back on itself, the better to see:
its veins have made a map of the sky
and are draining it region by region.
In thrall to the honey-lush-sweetness of light;
and its dance standing complete on the pedestal of its trunk.
So small a boat
atop so wide a water,
seeing myself reflected two-dimensional
over so vast a depth,
and afraid.
So vast the depth,
so flimsy the timbers,
so frail the hand drawing a ripple,
so transient the ripple,
so insignificant.
Unfamiliar that face
below the hand
dumbly observing
the passing moment;
I let my finger's ripple break it.
.
Kingfisher:
an emission of blue light
resulting from
the discharge of electricity
following the path
of shortest distance
between two trees
along a river
and flaring momentarily
at the tip of the cathodic branch
before termination of the event;
a shy bird.
It seems no government is going to take the necessary steps for environmental or climate change. And until they do, private individuals will feel taking steps is pointless. Change will only occur when there is an atmosphere of emergency as during the Covid lock-downs, right now it’s life as usual for the most part.
It’s not as though the steps are unknown. The production of plastics must be curtailed immediately;
it seems appalling to me that, for one example, that plastic packaging as is used for putting butter and jam on individual slices of bread in the catering industry is a gross overuse that could easily be better managed. Why don’t we go back to re-usable bottles of milk? Why isn’t there a rationing system on air travel for holidaying purposes, on the consumption of meat, on the amount of packaging used in retail, on the unnecessary use of water? Why is their space travel for the pleasure of a wealthy few?
And how mad is prosecuting war, as Modi told Putin now “is not an era of war”. He knowing better than most as catastrophic conditions become ever more prevalent and temperature records continue to be broken.
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently warned that the world is “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe.” Who, in twenty years time, will thank their parents and grandparents for caring so little about them and their planet that they over-looked such clear warnings and such clear evidence?
In nearly all the lists of what individuals can most usefully do, lobbying representatives comes near the top; they need to feel the fire. Talking about it is also considered vital to build the sense of imperative; the emergency is here, but we’re not all feeling the urgency yet.
Inside the fog of adult worries,
her terrors hulk;
fears beyond comprehension
remain unspoken,
she lacks the words;
her child’s face has the countenance
of a sixty-year-old
with eyes gazing out
from shattered innocence.
She stands as though alone
among the other children
and appears not to know
how to play.
That blackness, beyond the storage boxes,
tins of polish, hoover and copper kettle
was, in the beginning, a solid-looking barrier;
I had no intention of going near it.
Time passed, I ventured further. On my knees
into the space, discovering shadowy discards,
dismantled appliances, things unknown to me, perhaps
from an earlier time and still that pitch unknown ahead of me.
A cave, a bottomless shaft to Australia, to Hell?
Eventually I breached the darkness and found it stopped
right there, wood; a prosaic end to my fantasies,
a step out of childhood.
We walk among ghosts, they are our ether.
Switched to electronics,
we no longer feel their breaths.
Though Earth’s warnings crackle around us,
we stumble onward in science;
tumble backward in empathy to nature.
slowly
our lives become
our own;
as streams,
eddies and runs
settle
into their channels,
we find
our ways
I stop to gaze upwards into the falling petals,
filling my eyes with their gentle movement,
ears with the silence that descends with snow
and am for those moments lost to this world;
and wishing to share with another that silence,
notes played by petals that just shimmer down;
someone to share an enchantment; not just the fall
but the precariousness of so beautiful a moment.
you and I
a billion times
the starburst
of our lives
brighter
a trillion times
multiplied
the lips fingers
and dangled words
gentler
a thousand times
one trillion
love
His mind sparks explosions in four cylinders, maybe six,
pistons rise and fall, connecting rods turn the crankshaft,
clutch flywheel disengaged a moment, gears shifted and
torque in the wheels altered. His engine purrs; he mulls
turbo with or without variable compression, and always
finds quadratic equations and poetry hinder performance.
1. Juggling splintered sunlight
head lost in that globe
2. Walking on a sea of fallen leaves
kicking up happy days
3. Stringing them along a daisy-chain
seeing them wink as they pass
4. Tuning into starlings
up and down the short-wave.
Issue 11 featuring 32 poets at http://survisionmagazine.com/currentissue.htm and submissions for the James Tate Prize for a poetry chapbook accepted to the end of August. You can find more information about it here: http://survisionmagazine.com/jamestateprize.htm
I look at her,
childlike
in her distance;
a curl
dreaming.
Recognize
her solitariness;
the dream
a wall
around her;
a cold
realisation:
this primal
distance
between us.
I turn my head as a child, look back, see nothing.
When I turn forward again my face has been gouged,
there are splinters from the corners of my eyes,
my mouth is a mean line.
My eyes are pools;
their former blue submerged,
indistinct as dapples are in the shallows.
I turn my head as a child, look back, see nothing.
When I turn forward again I have my father’s face;
he is staring at nothing;
life has grown quiet inside him.
Watching you on the pier
as the ferry moved out to sea,
your face
your waving arm
you in a cluster of people
the cluster of people
the harbour
the town
the headland
the coast
and memory
like looking into a lighted grotto
seeing the tableau receding,
becoming distant
becoming a light bulb
eventually a star
among all the stars
identical to all the stars.
People:
we may, indeed, pass each other unaware.
Fish:
be that close, but almond-shaped sleekness,
pass on, never know.
Murk:
in which we swim and do not see, search
but not find what is all around.
Rows of empty seats, regimented,
plastic, steel legged,
but one, my mother watching me
signing books
with pride as I continue.
Years on, my mother among
those empty rows of seats,
smiling,
dead
but her smile remembered;
memory precarious as steam;
memory that fills purses
money can never reach.
Parched landscape;
a sandy wilderness
deeply gorged.
The geologic processes
ended now;
his eyes,
dried up water-holes,
partially filled with
some long-gone personal tragedy.
I found his heart,
a rusted old truck, abandoned,
curiously distant from any road.
All the days that have ever been;
the flowing rivers,
the dried-up rivers;
the old bones,
the new bones;
the grain of all our songs:
with this map you understand
this is the place that we are,
topography of our souls;
we tramp it living and dead.
Her body is pain;
birds flap inside that mesh;
she won’t entertain it, but
a facial alphabet pinballs momentarily.
Her eyes give her away;
corundum-hard crystallised agony;
beautiful too,
bullet-like.
Snow, it seemed to me, had the power to take away the sins of the world.
With that dazzling perfection, men’s minds could only be turned to the glorious
and beautiful; their hearts becoming salmon, medallions reflecting magnificent
light, must surely leap from the curve of their every-day lives.
Snow made the world pristine as Heaven is. Shining, peaceful, flawless;
to walk on fresh fallen snow was to walk an unsullied landscape; to walk in its
unearthly glow, which had the power to make even winter’s pitch black nights bright,
was, to me, a miraculous restoration of sight.
When the snow started to fleck the air outside our classroom, we all ran to the windows;
it was to be expected, even the teacher stepped towards it, allowing himself to be
mesmerised by the slow climbing down of billions of spiders; nature’s most astounding
coup, as the earth was prised from the doings of man, wonder restored, the opportunity
to write ourselves afresh on the empty canvas of the world.
A track into the woods,
turning out of view in the distance,
dragged me from the road
to the mysteries hidden in the shade
beneath trees,
in the darkness of tunnels.
That still flickering excitement
of childish adventures,
those reached only
through almost invisible entrances,
lightened my steps,
trimmed my years,
diverted me from the endless trudge
along those roads straightened by habit,
paved for safety.
I haven’t kept mementos;
memories decay with time’s mildew
and warmth becomes cinders eventually.
Love does keep calling,
but its voice ever more distant
is faint now.
If only your face was beside me,
just for this one moment,
I could chase away callous time forever.
Swans’ furious wings
in millions, in violence,
landing at graphite bay
sunder to a feathered lather,
light as beer’s head,
on the strand.
And so it is,
the fury of nature
that batters and drowns
next day
is a plaything for children,
froth to blow off their palms.
Her breathing
shallow, laboured;
life hanging
from a fraying string
and I searching for the right words,
the last words.
What are the words
that should sail the auditory canal
into her final minutes?
What can I say
into the turbulence of her breathing
to repay her love,
allay the fear,
lessen the hardship?
And now, years on,
trying to remember what I did say
as she bobbed on the tide of her dying;
moments when loving care
was reduced to the most caring words;
trying to remember if I had the words.
The wind from the west made the trees uneasy;
a glowering sky heaving pent-up violence;
the people on the seashore shrinking
to tiny letters in black print under Himalayan sky;
the ocean stepped backwards into distance.
Cracks of lightning shattering heaven;
fish, metallic splinters, breaking the ocean’s hide,
falling back, fragmented anger;
the bellowing cumulus thunder;
a hole in the far horizon where the sun hides down a burrow.
On this empty page,
I suddenly see your face,
a watermark.
Time-drained,
blurred features, mute;
loved face.
Memory,
a boulder dragged behind,
still sweeter
than vacuity;
so smile,
holographic smile.
I put my back to it, push the boat onto the limestone-coloured sea,
where the water takes it onto its own shoulders and I,
with feet firmly dug into the ribs, can row into the eternal.
The sea slams against the hull with my every stroke:
the clockwork of the ocean, of the universe,
inseparable from my blood’s tides.
I trust its speech resounding in the hollowed chest beneath me;
I believe in the anointing of my face with brine;
I get the measure of myself from none but the ocean.
Her eyes bombed out,
mouth a crater,
rubble her skin.
The war on her face;
no matter what face,
this face will always be beneath.
These, millions,
devastated landscapes;
and hers, to have and to keep.
You climb and climb,
see the detail of your everyday diminish;
climb higher, higher, see it disappear.
Mountain ranges, rivers, plains, cities;
the coastline, the ocean spreading away
to another continent, beyond continents.
A world of craggy peaks, sky and sun;
a horizon-less vision, earth into universe;
awestruck, rooted,
you marvel at the infinity of your soul.
Camera,
transport my skin of bones
to the breakfast tables of the first world.
These legs, arms, ribs
without muscle or flesh;
lay them there, inedible stuff.
Your readers, in the salve of their pity,
may impress themselves
with the rawness of their reactions,
be moved. And, yes, I understand:
with the turning of that page, the bones
will be returned to my private ownership.
The bed clothes
white clouds, and
her head, an abandoned object,
thrown upon them.
Behind her shut eyes,
who knows what stirs
though still,
so very still.
Brilliant sunlight, gleaming snow;
a new morning, a new earth
except for the trail of footsteps;
some philistine has damaged the canvas.
On closer inspection, a parchment
rich in some Neolithic script:
multiple series of tiny arrows speaking of gods,
grandeur, confusion, berries perhaps.
Bird prints, their writings
on the mysteries of a new earth.
I 'm a sucker for Pink Floyd and those beautiful guitar solos. Sometimes I get a longing to hear them, then light and sound are the same. If you fancy listening try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uchUg0AKcAU
Gilmour Guitar Solos
Played that guitar with its mouth gaping
teeth spilling out
spinning resorts
high as cumulus
sharp as rain flints
molten fingertips pulling notes
drill-bits pulverising the starry skies
steel tear-strings’ cut ends
whipping around
stratospheric
granite blades
alchemy
wisps into blue.
T'ang Dynasty poet, Li Po, is said to have died in 762CE when he fell drunk out of a boat trying to embrace the moon.
The enamel white moon made a ladle on the water.
Li Po, a tick full of wine with a romantic heart
rowed his boat up the long handle towards the bowl,
from which light poured bright as molten magnesium
and with the fondest memories of all his loves,
fell into water with arms wide to embrace the moon.
The embrace was chill and shivering; there was no light,
but, deceived by his last lover, he fell through that glory
into the dank cavern that takes us all to our final knowing.
High up above his head the light continued to beckon;
it beckons still to wine-drinkers with love in their hearts..
Last evening I gazed into water,
water gazed into me
and first to speak,
‘you’re lost’, he said.
The eyes seemed empty
to be unthinking,
but they were
and the message was full.
‘Both of us then’, I said
and his eyes were in mine;
I moved along
because he was troubling me.
Words,
swallows not trains,
swoop and dive;
blackbirds
lassoing the world
in their song,
trout leaps
through rings
in the river
sings;
not trains
no tracks,
but flies
flickering
light and sound
and swallows
swim
and blackbirds
lasso the world
in their song.
