A Beautiful Face

I have been wanting to write something about Murillo’s ‘Two women at a window’ for a long time. I’m so taken by it, in particular the maid-servant’s expression. It is so natural; so accurate in its depiction of her pleasure and humour, the spontaneity in the moment, in catching her status in relation to the younger woman  ̶  close, very knowing of the young  woman’s life and mind, but subordinate  ̶  .

 

 

There’s no point writing; there’s nothing I can write that would convey the beauty of the image and the moment more eloquently than time spent gazing at the picture.

The Face

A Trip through 500 hundred years of Male self-portraits with thanks to YtelSenda1, from whose YouTube channel I got the following

 

Who knows what shaped a face:

what wound, sickness,

words said, memory snagged;

what death, love lost, meals uneaten;

what unkindness, lie, loss;

what disappointment? 

Or was it love gained, then  happiness;

health and plenty;

an easy humour, carefreeness?

Was nature generous?

Or maybe it was all down to a day

when the blood did not run free.

 

With the Old Gods Went Gaiety

The Piper's Stones is a name  that has been given to a number of stone circles. The story of piper and dancers being ossified by the gods  for desecration of a holy day is often taken as representing the  more repressive stance that was adopted by the Catholic Church toward revelry of all kinds.

In those days the piper played the music of streams:

fast flowing runs, sprays that erupted in feet,

blood hitting high C, wheeling dancers dizzy with life.       

And so he played until the official stance on joyfulness shifted. 

That day on Brewel Hill the dancers, kicking up their feet,

 angered the gods, who had decreed that music-making was subversive;

and for godliness, jollity was transfigured to stone.

A Primitive Death

One eye a bog-hole, the other a slab,

bleached blue of childhood memory. 

I walk on water, sink in marble,

 

the thought engulfing me, 

I am drowning in its misshapen stare.

Last Tuesday Fabulous Arthur Quinn was found dead in his house

 

“Fabulous Arthur Quinn

and The Rhythm Fountain,

Cloudland, 1967.”

 

They saw the advertisement

in the Roscommon Herald;

it was in a box under the bed.

 

The Fountain must have dried up

quickly; Arthur worked

in the meat factory for years.

 

Left with a broken wrist in 1983

and went home,

he can’t have been that old.

 

They said Fabulous Arthur

must have stared at his ceiling

for at least 6 days without blinking.

A Meeting with Winter

The Cailleach is the goddess of  winter, Bríghde is her summer counterpart. A hag that can appear as a  beautiful young woman; she carries a staff that struck against the ground will cause it to freeze over instantly. She is associated with mountains, hills and cairns; the formation of landscape and the annual cycles and renewal in nature.

The looseness in interpretation of her powers, the large number of legends that surround her, her symbolism in relation to ecology and the state of the earth today, the leeway one has to represent her in  myriad ways makes, (and has made), her rich material for writers, poets and artists.

 

Driving a herd of goats down a gorge:

primeval creatures with colossal spiralling horns,

coarse matted hair, yellow eyes. 

Tendrils of hair trailing down her back,

silver streams through the buff tussocks,

the swirled bronze bracken of winter. 

Her face, graphite sheet of a waterfall;

eyes, dark crags in its flow;

at its foot a rowan’s red mouth. 

A staff held high,

above us hail stones ripened for a fall;          

she drove us from the mountain with lashes on our backs.

                                                                     from Above Ground Below Ground

The first day of 2015 came windy and wet

The first day of 2015 has come wet and windy. I’m looking out at the Bluestacks, their colours, shades of straw, duns and browns, muted in today’s mist; their heads stuck in dusty-looking cloud.

 Whatever the weather, this view is beautiful. On sunny blue days the mountains bridge the void between sky and earth. The low sun on crisp, shiny, winter days throws all the undulations on the mountainside into relief, bright swathes of sunlight are trimmed with rasher-shaped patches of shadow while broad expanses of dead  bracken gleam burnished bronze. Other parts of the mountains planted with larch, spruce and fir, have each tree sharply defined, steeples standing in serried ranks, bottle green, grey-brown rusting red. Lower down the slopes, a few angular fields, still clear, are traces of meagre living long gone.

This side of the valley is different. Ragged fields dotted with houses, mountainy sheep and rocky outcrops. If there was a logo for this side, it would be the hawthorn.

The hawthorn, more than any tree, evokes the character of this place. Rugged, resilient, sculpted through hardship; if the grey lichen-covered outcrops could grow into trees, they would be hawthorns. They are scattered up and down the humpy fields, ash-grey or black against the leaden sky. Sometimes their shapes are human-like, cries for help with starved limbs extended or stubborn resistance in the face of razor-edged winds.

But yesterday, the clouds were running, and spokes of smoky yellow sunlight radiated down on Donegal like God’s smile. In the distance Ben Bulben looked mythical in a warm, straw-coloured glow. The clouds were blue-tinted charcoal, some torn, others barrel-shaped; they had their own wars to contend with. Down here the hawthorns, standing bold on the curve of the hill, were transfixed like myself gazing westward, towards those lands of ancient legend. 

The world is beautiful. Happy new year.

Perfect Painting

Andrew Wyeth's painting of Helga conveys weight, and not just physical weight; I think it is supremely sensual. It stays in the memory and compels you to revisit it.

However, it  is not just the portraits, but his landscapes and still-life studies: there is an atmosphere to them, a feeling of being present, that is very unusual. The choice of  palette, the naturalness of his subjects and  compositions, his precision in depicting rural life , people and places. Maybe too we feel like we've got to know Helga, ourselves neighbours.

Whatever, I could  have written this poem for Wyeth and Helga. 

 

i.    ( painting ) 

The chevron shadow beneath her chin,

seagull-winged clavicles,

almond-eyed navel,

lush ravine of her groin,

parabola shade beneath her breast,

arc-topped thigh: 

he exposes these like an archaeologist

dusting a stone’s markings

into the light of day. 

ii. (one year later) 

The weight of her breasts,

the flesh-fold across her belly,

boniness of  her knees,

the muscles down  her calves,

knuckles of  that wrist

angled over the back of the chair: 

much more than seeing,

the feeling  impressed into my hands.

On Seeing Salman Rushdie

I've just stumbled on a short, whimsical poem I wrote many years ago.

Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ was published in 1988; a fatwa for his execution was issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. After this, Rushdie had to go into hiding. So imagine my surprise when, a few years later, I saw him, (well, it looked like him), drinking coffee in a window in George’s Street. Then a thought struck me.

 Under Fatwa 

In a coffee shop window,

couldn’t be!

He’d never sit in a window,

would he?

It must be someone else,

surely.

Now there’s a thought

just struck me:

I wouldn’t want to look like

Salman Rushdie!

 

 

I am weave

I am weave. Artwork by Elaine Leigh

 

I am weave,

flows bare bones of the land,

roots, blood my stealth;

streams mountain hair,

hillsides’ thoughts,

meadow waves;

bleaches sunlight, sugars earth,

rips the seas’ tides,

calls clockwork from branches,

drags bones down borrows,

drags days behind,

stirs the year.

The Way of it

I can't fit you into my scheme of things  

 

nor you me,

now that we've finally become ourselves.

 

I turn on you, sharper than a scalpel,

spit words chiseled to wound.

 

Out from beneath the quilt of affection:

our naked selves so vicious,

 

we bruise each other with the same fervour

that once marked our love.

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.

The perennial Question

For those born in the wrong place, life has no upside. The perennial question:

Jesus, don’t you remember thorns,  
 

taunts, flails, fear,

betrayal,

the weight of wood,

thirst,

nails,

the jolt of your cross into the earth? 
 

Lord, why is it still this way?

Child's Play

Hard to beat the imaginations of children. Our back garden was Landsdowne Road or Wembley, Croke Park, Lords. The shed gave us one well-formed goal complete with concrete net. It was nice to score in the top corner. It was also a bipeds' show-jumping arena, an obstacle course for cyclists and dangerously open ground for  cowboys. On frosty days a robin perched on the clothes line and declared it the finest day ever God sent. On a fine day, I lay out on a rug, watched glinting jets create the geometry of jet trails; I followed their progress as far as possible, then dreamed of places far far away.

The Fort 

When the shed was full of turf, Martin and I dug a bunker, mounted hurlies, one to the front, two through the slits in the back wall and spent all afternoon watching for Germans invading from Fahy’s or crawling on their bellies through the long grass behind Glynn’s.  

Sometimes we took our rifles onto the roof. Shot, we plummeted to our deaths onto the lawn or maybe parachuted with pillow-cases before dashing for cover under a hail of enemy fire.  

Now and then we charged, guns blazing, picking off enemy between the gooseberry bushes; or we fired on a jet, watched its jet-trail pouring smoke into the sky before ditching over the horizon, out beyond Stonepark. 

All winter our bunker dwindled; May saw the shed empty. Good thing too, it would have been hard playing the Cup Final with turf still stacked in the net.

Word-power

My favourite word to in the English language is ‘rapscallion’. What a pleasure it would be remonstrate with the greatest indignation ‘You, sir, are a rapscallion; a cad, a bounder of the most insidious hue.’

For building drama, it is hard to compete with the man  I overheard, many years ago,  at a Roscommon Galway football match, who punctuatedly blurted, ‘Ref……..Ref………you………….you………..(mounting expectation all around)……you…..(worries for his state of health)……. you……(it’s going to be appalling) ………you….………..pookie!’

But, of course, Shakespeare had the edge here too: word-power gave him the full pallette : ‘You starvelling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish – O for breath to utter what is like thee; you tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!’

Or, how about the more pithy,

‘ You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian!’  (both Henry IV)