Goya

Goya from The Disasters of War

Goya

Of course not!

Of course no one that ever cracked open a head

has seen a symphony pour out.

No executioner has seen the flow of an amber fireside

with its intimate and tangling caresses 

drain from the split skulls of lovers 

 nor have soldiers who shoot dark holes 

 seen rafts of memories spilling, 

 carrying the children, the birthdays, the orchards, 

 the dances. 

 When they shot the poet, Lorca,

 the bullets sailed in a universe, 

 yet when the blood spurted it was only blood 

 to them.

The Country Child

       The Country Child.

The country child

runs in and out of rain showers

like rooms;

sees the snake-patterns in trains,

the sun's sword-play in the hedges

and the confetti in falling elder blossoms;

knows the humming in the telegraph poles

as the hedgerow's voice

when tar bubbles are ripe for bursting;

watches bees emerge from the caverns

at the centres of buttercups,

feels no end to a daisy chain,

feels no end to an afternoon;

walks on ice though it creaks;

sees fish among ripples and names them;

is conversant with berries

and hides behind thorns;

slips down leaves, behind stones;

fills his hands with the stream

and his hair with the smell of hay;

recognizes the chalkiness

of the weathered bones of sheep,

the humour in a rusted fence,

the feel of the white beards that hang there.

The country child

sees a mountain range where blue clouds

are heaped above the horizon,

sees a garden of diamonds

through a hole scraped

in the frost patterns of his bedroom window

and sees yet another world

when tints of cerise and ochre

streak the evening sky.

He knows no end, at night

he sneaks glimpses of Heaven
through the moth-eaten carpet of the sky. 

The Viewing.

Dead: the colour of old cream,

his eyes shuttered shut;

so neat, besuited and slim,

the weight he lost dying.

They made a basket of his fingers

with a rosary spilling down;

everyone said he looked lovely,

but when I touched his face

it wasn’t him at all.

Breathing

We take it for granted. And then comes dying, we stand around the bed watching the work that is breathing. And you think my father is dying and he must work; work harder than he has all his life. How merciless is death that makes you toil to pass through its gate.

Breathing

Now my father's life

is breathing.

Heavy work.

He has already slipped away

to be alone

while we outside

mark every breath

like lap timers.

Now come the spaces:

a breath

is an isolated thing.

Finally one breath

arrives alone.

I feel a soul has left,

but just then

I see, so clearly,

it was hope

that slipped out of the room.

SUMMER ORCHARD EVENING.

On an evening

when apple was eating the worm,

tree grating the sun

with some clouds, dusty birds;

the green cloth

was spread to the orchard wall.

I watched bees collecting post

while cat was a tea cosy

with dozey trip-wire eyes.

Suddenly dog alarm in the hedge

comes bursting from the undergrowth:

big game hunter

and cat gone steeplejack.

Then dog winks

and we stretch out,

and I go back to being a microscope

eyeball deep in daisies.

What Does He See Where I See Only Stone?

What does he see where I see only stone?

The man is still, his gaze fixed on the ground

but that gaze compels you to look again;

in such  moments a mind might overreach the stars.

I see my reflection, he says;

I see my hair no longer covers my head,

its silver ring above my ears, he says,

is like gorse cleared from a hill-top.

And, he says, I see the child struggling

in the young branches of childhood,

the school doors fanning him on and on

through corridors of captivity, a whirligig

through years, disremembering his own footsteps.

I see the would-be lover, and he loved his hair;

he put a shine in his eye like I polish a shoe;

and his full bracelet of teeth; my God, he could smile.

I see how time subtracts: aging dreams

till they become hobbled old goats that have outstared you,

till they have become unbelievable.

My young loves reflected back have their young faces still

but I would be afraid to see them now.

My plans and projects are shunted, rusting old carriages;

I don't visit them anymore.

The old man's arms are folded so fingers lie like stripes

on his right arm, forage in the dark woolen sleeve

of his left. His head is slightly forward,

his eyes unblinking as though entranced

by weeds growing on the floor of a pond.

I see too that I never held the reins of a life,

that indifference is a colander, indecision has the grasp

of a hand without fingers. Days are punched down

like receipts onto a nail; named, counted, collected,

they grow into months; life flitting across the pages 

of a calendar, falling  into the holes between Christmases.

And I remember those Christmases

long ago when I was young, the totting up  ̶

over a drink   ̶  of departed faces and the wishes,

the wish-bone skinny wishes for the coming year

that smouldered beside a glass of stout and then went out.

I see those faces whose roots entangled with my own,

how arrogance blinded me so I could not see

it was the carpet of their roots that buoyed me up

until recently, feeling them slip away,

feeling the cold gaps they’ve left around me, I discovered

it wasn’t I that put the colours in my head,

and with that discovery much has toppled

that hindered my view. I see, as though from a height,

my head is indistinguishable from all the others

rushing like froth from this life that we call

living.

Now his face is raised, his eyes red-rimmed

with the racing bobbin that’s in his head:

I saw the ground and the scuffed toe to my shoe;

a lifetime might have no other measure than 

its number of worn out shoes.

Memories of Galway

It's a  lifetime ago. I mean I wrote this poem a lifetime ago. My student-life in Galway, well that's two lifetimes ago. But this poem does catch my Galway. 

Do I still have a soft spot for that city: no, I don't think so. Happiest memories so rooted in their time and place, that the place can never live up to them. Best to leave those locations shimmering as they do in your head. 

From Galway

1.

At half past five we cracked dawn on the Salmon Weir,

swished the rose-coloured sky around our eyes,

clinked our voices.

Then on down College Road like circus folk,

past Johnny Ward's, past the university

where the crows were blowing the ears off the trees,

past the Regional and Kelehan's

and on out to Salthill to shine out loud with the ocean.               

  

2.

I remember Galway's soft drizzle,

each droplet carrying an atom of perfume

from the Glenard garden hedges.

My night-time walks in  that lazy spray:

onto Threadneedle Road,  down to the prom,

out onto the diving board at Blackrock.

Then the palm of mist along my cheek;

the tide repeating

easy, easssssy, easssssssy.

 3.

Each evening the flotilla of swans returns to the Claddagh;

they are, through half-closed eyes,

a thousand yachts drifting by like ghosts.

On the far wall a trawler slumps;

sometimes children run to it but it disappoints them. 

Here is the colour of Galway,

that falls from the clouds that mop the spires,

that rises again in the Burren hills across the bay.   

4.

The boats went on the river in May.

Nothing was more beautiful than the wooden thud

of the oars, than the glare into the eyes,

the voices over the water, that slow slow progress

and the gurgling beneath the boat.

And sometimes into the reeds,

where sunlight fell as though a Japanese screen,

its spectrum on the water disturbed

by a thousand dark lines like flamingoes' legs.

That first year my eyes were studded with splinters

 of sunlight, my ears flooded with the ripples' laughter.

  

5.

It was cosy in the Cellar:

the fire, the bodies, the sunshine that we snared

in our pints of lager,

Gerry Mulholland licking out tunes on the piano,

the whiff of Balkan Sobranie.

All day long heads were coming round the door,

hippies with jester-clothed kids,

long-haired musicians with slaked tongues,

mothers battering through with buggies and shopping.

Sometimes Andy, shambling behind the bar,

undoubled long enough to vent a curse-like greeting,

if he saw you, if he remembered you, if he had no choice.

Then closing time: the wind invited in the opened door

and that god-awful glass scraping down the window-pane.

6.

In Winter the rain made sizzling sounds on Shop Street,

rivulets of shop-lighting rushed along the gutters

with yachting cartons that collected in the grates;

slate-coloured people ran doorway to doorway and

bus queues stood limp and dripping like clothes on a line.

Each footfall splashed a halo of water, soaking shoes;

collars were pinned closed with fingers;

but I remember  that the rain made cables of your hair

and they ran currents down your back.

7.

Out Newcastle Road, down Saint Mary's,

past the Claddagh Palace, the Cottage, the Warwick;

and Salthill still asleep with that blank look

on its doors as though drink had not yet been discovered.

Then down onto the strand where the swish of the sea

filled our ears like shells, where we wrote our names,

where the sun found us and shaded in

that group of shadows it never found again.

8.

There was a house on Nun's Island we fancied

where the water ran almost to the door.

Sometimes we would walk around that way

just to see it, just to say our house is looking well.

I never mention it to anyone;

I’ve passed it and passed without looking;

that moment invisible to everyone but us.

And I don’t see you. I wonder how you are. 

\

The poem in Sunfire had a stanza edited out that I quite like, it was this:

Do you remember, Martin, that Sunday in May,

you and I were on the river about twelve,

a beautiful Summer morning

and we heard the music of flageolets?

So we stopped and looked, but there was no one.

Fifty yards away the Menlo road ran behind a grassy bank

and a low stone wall. The music kept rising

but there was only ourselves on the water.

A band was playing marches right beside us;

the river was still, there was a rock near the boat

with a smooth round back, 

And then above the wall a child's head appeared,

then two, then four, and maybe fifty more,

only to disappear as soon, dragging their tail of music

behind them.

A love poem

I Give You       

 

This tree's dripping fruit

to place in your mouth

to ripen your tongue.

 

The water guttering down

these green leaves

to be a trellis of fingers

about you.

 

This soft drizzle of sunlight

to fall gentle as the petals

of meadowsweet on your cheeks.

 

This bindweed and all tendrils

to hook and bind

our desires together.

 

At Sartre's Funeral

This poem has little to do with Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, but the image of her sitting in a chair above  his grave got me started. I didn't see a photograph, so it was easier to envisage her as, almost, sitting by her hearth.

It is one of a number of poems that would not have been written if I had seen the image as it actually was. I wrote a number of poems on the subject of the felos in Galician carnaval (published in a chap-book, Felos aínda serra, by Amastra-N-Gallar, 2004; see link in side panel); I saw the images in black and white; had I seen  the many photographs which were in colour I would not have been able to write them.

They Gave Me A Chair.

 

They gave me a chair

so I could sit beside the grave,

like a woman painted in

after the funeral crowds had gathered.
 

 

And I, his lover, was looking down

as though this earth was some sort of heaven,

thinking

I'd prefer it south-facing

or he could do with a bit more space

or some other such nonsense.
 

 

Then alone again, I found,

fixed above all my memories,

the picture of a coffin

on the floor of an empty room

as seen from above.

A Moment Certified By Lovers

A Moment Certified By Lovers.

 

It's a certifiable moment

a punch-drunk second

a pulse's high tide.

 

A dog eats grass

a water drop shivers

a barrel fills to its brim

an apple falls 
a body drifts 

a face buckles

a lover screams.

 

At the tip of an orgasm

passion powders;

the creek turns to dust.

 

 

 

                                           from Sunfire, (Dedalus Press, 1997)