Heightened Vision

Heightened vision. And seeing everything around you as part of the texture of your life.(Too much texture.) The minutest detail magnified, and considered like a tiny echo of the main argument in your head. This lucidity that can be part of the dam-burst of a lover’s quarrel.If you see it coming, get out of the way.





Seeing............

(part of my love story)

discarded matches on the pub floor,
reflections in gutters,
cobwebs in the corners of ceilings,
petals shed and shriveling,
railings’ wrought iron curlicues,
broken windows, tattered curtains,
carrier bags snagged on branches,
the moon running along beside me,
heron one-legged by the pond,
a glove on the footpath;

each fleck, speck, flaw in your argument;
every minute branded, second burned
as thoroughly as a pipe smoker’s match.


I would like to refer back a few posts to July 1st, Autumn Conversations; it seems I posted an earlier version of the poem, not the one that was finally published in the Sunday Tribune. So for anyone interested, I've made the changes.

Communion Girls.

Small white spinning tops;

tinkered with children

parade affectation,

grotesque display

of competing Hail Marys.



On May 25th

doll darlings

agitate for cash;

let us pray.


“Let us pray

for long white dresses,

matching gloves,

patent shoes and handbags.”



“Dear Baby Jesus

let there be sun;

may it twinkle and shine

on our little one.”

Miners Town

"Carry slack" she says
to the spires of smoke
stealing away from Miners Town
where every child is born
to carry a bucket.

In the evening the little men
will gather below the street
where the pit-head eyebrows meet
so when their fathers come,
they'll parade nearby;
smaller jackets just.

A jet shape of geese
passes through the smoke columns;
for a moment she travels too
but then they leave her,
disappearing each year
over the same roof-top.

"Carry slack," she repeats
into the dog's ear of a kitchen door,
and in the shortened evening
she too unfurls a stalk of smoke
that'll mark her place
in the forest above Miners Town.

Growing Up

Shortly you will trace lines,
leave,
join the herds,
leave your trail among the trails
meandering over the hills.

We are part of some eccentric’s
geometry;
I wish I could tell you more,
my little love.

The baby in the tree

The baby in the tree
is screaming.

High above the pathway
near the black tips
of the sycamore branches
he is gaping,
white membraned luminous.

How did he get there?

He blew there in the wind;
it took him
like a flag from his cot
till he was stretched
across the boughs
like the wings of a bat.

And who sees him?

I do;
all his hopeless writhing,
too high for the passerby.
And his screams:
too high,
too high for the passerby.

In Mayo

Some places remain in your head all your life. Not intact, but fragments that still convey (broadly) the appearance of the place. So you return, and your geography is completely off but the essence is right.
As a student of Geology, I spent a week mapping in Finney near Lough Nafooey in Co. Mayo. A wonderful time and a wonderful place. The fragments have stayed with me ever since. When I wrote a poem “In Mayo” sometime around 1990, it was Finney I was thinking of.

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruthann/sets/72157600099944683/ for a range of photos from this beautiful area. From “Sunfire”:


In Mayo

The sky:

rags on bushes
in a wintry gale.

The barbed-wire fence:

a lunatic's music
sprinting down the valley.

The mountains:

tossed heads
with their silvery sheen.

Telephone wire:

daisy-chained voices
humming out of tune.

The lake:

a shirt that blew
off a line.

Rowan tree:

tongue on the mountain
shaping high C.

More Laughter Yoga in Rathmines

Another chance to take an instant vacation.

Cathetrine O'Dea will be leading two series of Laughter Yoga in Rathmines over the coming weeks. The first begins on Tuesday 10th May in Centre Studios, Rathmines (over Boots),5.45pm to 6.45pm. The second begins Thursday 12th May, 4.00pm to 5.00pm, at Swan Leisure. Both will run for five weeks and the cost is 45 euros,(30 euros: OAPs job-seekers and students).

Wear comfortable clothing, bring yoga mat or towel and a bottle of water.

Inspirational Bacon

Three Monsters (Sunfire, Dedalus Press 1998) is based on Francis Bacon’s famous triptych. The visceral nature of much of his work cuts straight through to feeling and so makes writing more heart-felt and immediate, that along with the mind-bending imagery which aids innovation.


Three Monsters.


Here are three monsters :
Agony, a greyhound skinned; howl.
Hollowness, a hen plucked; peck.
Dementia, a bundle of hay; scratch.


I have stood them on furniture
to pose.


They were in the entrails of spirit,
I picked them out with a forceps.
I thought they looked remarkable in the light.
I thought the viewing public
might want to scrape at them
with their spatulas.





Attitude (Sunfire) came from another Bacon image, "Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge)".It has probably further from the spirit of the artist’s work; somehow the image engenders feelings of pity in conveying delicacy and vulnerability.

Attitude.


Who owns the child
with the withered arm-wings,
who carries the mutation that weighs a tonne;
who, when the air is full of flight, hops
and hops and hops.


See how the children littering the yard
launch like torn pages into careless flight.
Like gulls they hog the sunlight
while a sea worries far below.
This is the currency.


But who owns that child,
the child with the withered arm-wings.


Whatever about the success of the poems, Bacon’s art is wonderful.

Roscommon Childhood

Roscommon, and the memories of a happy childhood there, in a poem that starts off realistically but ends with a skyscape transposed to earth. The child's imagination makes the place a Paradise at the close.


Frosty Morning From My Parents Bedroom

The music box plays
my mother’s glass-topped
mahogany
dressing table;

the frost-petalled
window
with a peep hole
for my blue eye;

a hedge of brittle
looping briars,
Curley’s field a flood
of sugary brilliance;

the beeches,
their heads in the stratosphere;
a barbed-wire fence
staggering between them;

abbey ruins,
a spire and steeple:
Roscommon town
cocooned beside

an ocean of duck egg blue
that rolls into a bay
beneath snowy mountains
a million miles away.

The Disaster of War

I get a lot of inspiration from photographs, particularly those that relate to human tragedies; and of these none have moved me more than Don McCullin’s work.
This photograph exemplifies my point. This soldier: his pockets pilfered, a trail of personnel items strewn on the ground. A family destroyed, their photographs scattered; the ruination of lives unimportant, the girl in the photograph just a child. All that is important to the assailants: pilfered. There is no glory in war.



Soldier


Shot crossing a wasteground;
they left him,
pockets pilfered,
staring beyond all wars;

a trail of photographs
and letters running from him
like a congealed flow
of memories.

Separation

This poem from "Turn Your Head" is one of those I am happiest with. It says what I wanted it to in a striking way. The separation described is complete, the poem's logic builds to an appropriate climax, the sadness heightened by the absolute separation of land and sea. The last sentence hits a tragic truth for many people.

Growing Apart - A Separation.

You take the sea, I’ll take the land.
Growing cautious in air currents
my ears will extend to points,
my nose grow long, eyes flinty.
I will have hair to thwart the wind,
jointed limbs that angle to take a fall.

Your sides will be sleek to cut the water,
your face an arrow, even eye-lids
planed to nothing. Your skin
will have the dapples of flowing liquid,
drop-shaped scales. By then, of course,
we will not recognize each other at all.

A Child's Heaven

Boyhood. We spent countless summer hours catching minnows. They were the most happy, carefree times of my life. Maybe that’s why work doesn’t do it for me; empty hours filled with the heat of the sun and the buzzing of bumble bees in a field of buttercups and a sparkling stream running through it: that’s my idea of heaven.

Then and Now


Light cavorting on the stream,
choruses of flies on dung,
the flush green of Roscommon fields.

Whole afternoons I would spend
watching minnows dart
beneath those smidereens of sunlight.

Larder to larder, cold flowing weed,
combed fresh opulence.
No trickery in a jam jar; dull brown they died.

This morning sitting in Dublin;
smidereens of sunlight played on the ceiling
and I remembered this.

Blessed with lots of dull weather

I’m walking along Murvagh beach just south of Donegal town. It’s all but empty; a beautiful stretch, maybe two miles of pristine sandy coastline; undeveloped, unpolluted, unlittered. Looking to the southwest, Mullaghmore juts into the sea, Ben Whiskin and Ben Bulben loom above in varying shades of watercolour blue.

Ben Bulben, the most majestic gravestone imaginable; Yeats is buried at its foot under the words “ Cast a cold eye/On life, on death/Horseman, pass by!”. And not far beyond, but out of view, is the town of Sligo, arguably the most beautifully situated town in Ireland, being, as it is, between lake, mountain and sea.

Just south of Murvagh are two similarly beautiful stretches of sandy beach, Rosnowlagh and, on the other side of Ballyshannon, Tullan Strand.

Imagine these beaches at lower latitudes: a promenade of tacky bars and discos blairing music, chippers, souvenir shops with shamrock emblazoned ashtrays and woolly lerechauns, on the beach lines of deck chairs at ten euros each, grim multi-story appartment blocks, long stretches of beach cordoned off for different hotels, pedal boats, hawkers stopping you every few minutes, and the sea outside cut up with speed boats, banana boats and various other money-making geegaws.

I suppose in recessionary times this might have some appeal; but today there is only the marvellous beauty of the place, unspoiled for now, and a feeling of gratitude for dull Irish weather.

The Muse

When people are in love their minds keep turning like washing machines. Thoughts and emotions going round and around, the accompanying commentary with them. No wonder then that so much poetry has come from individuals with love issues.

Visit

When I am sleeping
you come
softly over these stones;
I turn deeper.
You slip words into my ears,
liquid syllables,
sickles sliding down.

Night-time turns drunk;
longing for more,
your tongue to enwrap me;
I turn deeper.
You trickle down dreams;
our limbs braided,
we slip into one.

Ruins

There is a particular atmosphere that pervades the ruins of cottages throughout rural Ireland. I think it has to do with their former humbleness, sometimes their isolation,the fact that it our own (and not so distant) history and also knowing that the famine emptied them and left them bleak reminders of our impoverished past.

I am drawn to them: to recreate the rooms in my mind, furnish them, family and belongings, visualise what it was to read by the light coming through that window, sit at the hearth, drop the head to avoid the lintel coming through the front door.

When the ridges can still be seen in the vegetable plot or a line of fuschia still survives outside the door delineating what was the extent of their patch, it is doubly poignant. The most moving place in Ireland is, I think, the deserted village on Achill. A huddle of about 100 ruined cottages. You get a strong sense of what it was to be in a community living so closely together. While standing there, and drawing on what you know from books like Peig or maybe the film “Man of Aran”, you people the streets quite easily; the place does it for you.

The mental images can be extremely vivid, the feeling very strong: a haunting sadness, and somehow a memory. And because you know it you do not want to leave soon.
Ireland is littered with these ruins. Like holy wells, they transport you to another place, a more thoughtful place. It is good that they survive.

Flickr has a number of photographs of the deserted village at Slievemore on Achill Island and numerous others of ruins througout Ireland.

from Sunfire

The hunch-doubled thorns,
ingrown pantries
dung-puddled;
the moss-stone walls
tumble-gapped.

The nettle-cracked doorway,
lintel-fallen
byre-footed;
the cloud curtained windows
elder-berried.

The stone-sheltered air
bumbled still,
ruin-reverent;
the submerged garden ridges
dumb-founded.