Croghonagh

 How many paintings did Cezanne paint of Mont Sainte-Victoire? In different light, from different angles, at different times, in different seasons, different weathers. 

I look at the Gap and see the mountains change chameleon-like through the course of a day, much less a year. Irish weather is as changeable as it gets: bright sunshine alternates with rain frequently, not in a season, but in a day, an hour. With the shifting clouds, shifting colours; shifting cloudscapes. In driving rain, the mood changes: darker shades seem to bring darker moods. In mist, the mountains become vague and mysterious; suggestions of other things.

All in all, this place is a dream for landscape painters, but for poets too. 

Croaghonagh at Barnesmore in Donegal from a particular angle is a fearsome-looking cliff, from other angles less so. But with the never-ending procession of changing weather types, it seems almost alive. I wish I had the painter's skill to convey this, indeed, I wish I had greater skill in poetry to achieve it. But that, of course, hasn't stopped me yet.

Croaghonagh

This morning, cloud

streamed as jauntily from its neck

as any scarf that ever trailed

backward over a 1920’s Roadster.

At three, threatening

fiercely,

it glared across the valley

with a thunder-rolled brow.

After sunset, the light reflected

off the burnished

undersides of clouds,

dressed it in a burgundy evening gown.

Come dawn, it will be transparent;

birds lighter than seeds

will glide through its space

on elegant outstretched wings.

.

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.

On Murvagh Beach

There’s so little difference between sea and cloud

that the whole scene might as well be upside down,

with the bisectors of St John’s Point, a finger stretching

across the horizon, and Mullagmore, a finger, Adam’s to God,

reaching back. To the left, white clouds are hanging,

sheets from a bed, down the sides of Ben Bulben; to the right

the Bluestacks are slumped  beneath mosquito nets of rain.

Smokey light is filling the bay like ether, lulling the world,

so waves that have raced across the ocean, surviving the fury

at Rosnowlagh, now collapse, spent, onto the sand.

Murvagh beach, pooled with clouds we’re walking through;

two silhouettes moving along the bottom edge of a canvas now cause

 a tin of paint to splatter upward: a bevy of oystercatchers taking to flight.

Hawthorns on the mountain

Isn’t the windswept hawthorn the most perfect representation of the mountain weather in Barnesmore, Donegal. Gnarled, grizzled, stunted, they protrude from the moss-coloured slopes like the skeletons of prehistoric birds struck flightless at their moment of take-off. They are crusty old codgers caught in photogenic poses between the grey-lichened outcrops of granite and the moving outcrops that are the sheep on the mountain, and the tangling, cloud-coloured, gushing streams. They make for the best of neighbours.