“Hallucinatory”, you say! Sky,
earth,animal concentricly ringed.
Lives: stone, stone and river, river, human.
Hallucinatory: spirals, zigzags, chevrons, sunbursts!
Yes, I see the vortex you travelled through,
I see the serpentine trace of the Boyne,
Knowth, Dowth, Newgrange along its path;
the lozenged pattern of fields through which it flows;
the arced hills, chevron forests of trees.
Earlier, I saw the angular graph of human worries
side by side with the eternal turning of Gods’ backs;
the cardiograph pattern that reads mortality
next to the celestial manifestations that measure out lives.
I have seen the sundial that marshals the symbols into their
system,
an assignation with mathematical precision;
I have seen them liquefied to become art,
much as Van Gogh painted the night sky.
(The Sundial Kerbstone at Knowth is a remarkable piece of work. Is it the earth's oldest sundial? One way or the other, it puts many of the motifs in celtic art into a scientific framework. Google an image, if you're not familiar with it.)
