Reflection

 

The sunlight on the back of your neck,

ear-lobes, hair;

the page-reflected glow onto your chin,

dimming upward towards your eyes;

all else, darkness around you.

 

If I’d never seen that you are beautiful;

that day, the light that chose to steal up behind you,

to settle on you  so gently, but dazzlingly;

that light would have been light enough

to reflect forever in my mind.

A Reflection on Love and Age

 

So, I suddenly find myself within a few weeks of my sixtieth birthday. And, of course, (life being a countdown), I have been expecting it.

However, the notions that I had of what it is to be sixty have all been revised. I see age in the mirror, but not sixty, not by a long shot. Nor do I see it in the faces of my relatives and friends, not sixty, not seventy. I have to assume that others do see it, (all too clearly), but still, I, somehow, hold out the hope  that I am an exception.

Which brings me to the point of my reflecting on my age. I met an American girl many years ago; her name was Sara. She spent sometime in Ireland, during which  she attended a writers group. In truth, I only spoke to her a couple of times; in her work, I recognized the subtlety that the  very best writers possess. I got what she was about, and she  understood my efforts. Today, I still have the testament to this in the book of English translations of Lorca she gave me that last night she attended the workshop.

Occasionally, I have  googled her name to see if she has become the writer she promised.  Yes, there is someone out there writing under her name; it doesn’t appear that  she has made it big, but at least she is still indulging a passion. Is it the same  Sara: we never got past some friendly words, I’ll never know.

She comes into my mind, because I think I fell in love with her. Not a wild physical love, but I think one falls in love with those who see the beauty that you see,  (imagine), in yourself. And those who see that deep internal beauty, see it because they too have it. And so you meet a soulmate.

It has happened a handful of times my life; that surge of recognition of a soulmate. It happens in brief encounters, maybe brief enough not to have found the negative; and so the person remains unsullied, perfect in your mind. The memories persist like hauntings. They persist as tiny, nagging, life-long longings.

At this age, I can permit myself to say that certain things are life-long. I can say too that there are feelings that persist. That aging is not as it appears in the mirror, because some things just haven't changed.

A Memory of my Father

A Memory of my Father

 

Shaft of Sunlight,

reflection off a million specks

of dust,

fed his face with lines and grace.

 

Soft light paints old faces

the friendliness of sweet Autumn apples.

He talked on;

I looked in.

Depression. One Fruit

I must have written this on a quiet night. Occasionally I get depressed. Then the forward flow  of life is arrested and a disappointment settles over all. It might be triggered by something in particular, but the soft grey that settles has no particular focus. It locks out light and leaves you sitting energy-less and incapable of rising to the words of love that the sufferers around you deserve for their forbearance.

Fortunately, it's not a very regular visitor in my case, and after a day or few days, I'm back, slightly dented maybe and sometimes with a poem that has come from my deepest self. 

 

No Title

 

This evening I will leave my mask and crutch,

go to the well, immerse myself

till there is no chill;

till water, moss, sky and I are all one marble.

 

So when you find me, my love, this  smile,

my limbs and fingers will be milk-white;

rosaries will be hanging; petitions,

stuffed between my jaws, fluttering in the wind.

 

And the reason will hang: a faint quivering

of atoms in the air around you,

an SOS in a register just beyond audibility;

and the mask’s smile: a mouth full of soil.

Yesterday

 

 

A poem you said I should write. 

 

An African nurse on your ward,

born the day after her  grandmother died,

called Yesterday.  

She was gone as soon.

Nurses from the agency come and go,

good relationships are important

for the patients, you explained.  

And now you are gone; who will carry your spirit?

Tried and trusted strategies for improving political image

1.       The party leader during prolonged applause should let his/her gaze travel along the balcony, whether there is or is not a balcony. In the latter case, the gaze should be pitched at an angle of elevation of approx. 35 degrees.

2.       The greater statesperson is instantly recognizable by his/her being first to extend an arm to usher the other into position when the event is being televised.

3.       The greater statesperson is instantly recognizable by his/her being first to extend a finger to point to something in the sky when the event is being televised. (This might be a cloud shaped like a pigeon or Italy.)

4.       At election time the leader of a Irish party must walk through Ballyfermot in particular formation.  The  preferred  is shown below.

 

 

 

 

 

      A variation on this, which has been much used in the particular instance of whistle-blowers    making public statements is shown below.

 

 

 

5.       When the party leader is making a statement which is to be screened on the main evening news, it is imperative that he/she employ a small group of Father Dougal wannabes to form a semi-circle behind him/her. This group receives basic training in head-nodding, while  one member  of the group receives additional instruction in looking to the left.

 

6.       In the interview situation, the effective politician must always anticipate. At the earliest indication of an unwelcome thread in the questioning, he/she  must be  prepared to recite large portions of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. Versatility is essential, on other occasions it may be more appropriate to deconstruct the plotline of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or sing a little Tom Waits.

7.       In the interview situation, there is no need for the politician to answer the question posited as long as the answer addresses a topic which rhymes with the original e.g. brown envelope, brown antelope; water charges, otter miscarriages.

8.       This final point is obvious but important. The number of women in a cabinet has a minimum threshold that must be observed, however this number must be kept at this minimum. The reason is basic, overt coloration in clothing can sink, not just the individual, but the  entire party.

 

Pain

 

Frida Kahlo knew more about pain than almost any artist I can think of. No surprise then that her paintings need go no further than herself, indeed often no further than her face to represent pain. She learned to live with physical pain, she had no choice: she and pain were one. In her painting ’the broken column’, the column depicts unbearable pain, but is also the backbone of her body.

Frequently, the strength of her imagery comes from her maintaining an austere but otherwise quite inscrutable expression, she lets the symbolism supplied by the various animals or plants that frame her head carry the message. It is understatement that carries the weight in these works.

I mention it because in poetry, time and time again, (even among many poets who are highly lauded), the  urge to spew high-flown verbiage, strangling their poems at birth, leaves me, for one, longing for a good ole football match.

 

The Clouds have overrun the sky

 

 

The whole countryside’s a fluster:

meadows quivering, a tree is screaming,

the boulders have clapped hands over their ears.

 

The word is that the stars have been burgled,

a stream’s stolen the silver,

and a cave, (whisper it), has swallowed the moon.

Do I love you, Science

The Beginning of Science

 

 

Long before Saint Patrick,

leather-footed musicians

would keyhole dawn

to catch the sun in ice candles.

 

They played those flames on strings,

their spikes of sound,

for children’s whistling eyes and lunatics,

who, in their distance, danced.

 

Fire caged in ice, ice in their hand;

music lit from within;

ambition began;

separation became a beauty.

Ungar Died (a short play for lovers of film)

o   What?

·         Ungar died. Ungar………….Felix.

o   Tony Randall?

·         Jack Lemon.

o   Oh.

·         The only man in the world with clenched hair.

o   Put coasters under the coasters, checked for spiders’ muddy footprints on the bathroom floor………..

·         Yeah.

o   You’re like Ungar yourself, you know.

·         What?

o   Neurotic. Only person I’ve ever met who avoids sleeping  on his side so one kidney wouldn’t be over-worked.

·         That only happened once.

o   And you wash money.

·         Yeah, well a recent study concluded that there are 138 harmful bacteria on an average two cent coin.

o   Like I said.

·         By an odd coincidence, you’re not too far from Osca r either ………….. not exactly mouldy, but fermenting. That pair of trousers you took off last Friday is still standing outside your bedroom door; Cecily ran screaming out of the house when she came upon it yesterday. It took half an hour to settle her.

o   Cecily’s scared of her shadow.

·         Well they left together yesterday.

Jesus carries his cross through the Vatican

It's taken most of the day, but  I think this picture shows the inappropriateness of the Vatican as a centre for the promulgation of the Christian message. The Vatican Museum belongs to a time when we talked of  'princes of the church'; it's time for all Christian denominations to sell their jewels.

 

 

 

 

Cities

 

City Lives.

  

They shout into space,

answer each other like whales

across great haunted distances;

they never meet,

only sound waves ever meet.

 

 

Alone in their canyons,

hives,

shoals

they roar.

Rooms upon rooms

upon houses upon houses

upon streets upon streets:

roars spilling out,

spilling over,

spilling down.

 

A million sound waves,

a million discordancies

tumbling, surging, 

pouring out

onto the streets,

into the traffic,

wheels, cogs, pistons:

 

the cannibal jazz

of cities.

 

Where Are You

         Where Are You.

 

Where are you.

Where are you child.

Among the spring green leaves

Naked as a lizard;

I hear your airy lilt,

Why are you humming.

 

From what remote well

Do these grotesque sounds come;

Dispatched, bleak cirrus

In the high skies of a child's voice,

Freezing all the forest

Into fairy-tale stillness.

 

Where are you,

Where are you child.

In what empty paradise;

Where's the tower that emits your eccentric song;

Against the frozen wings of which birds of paradise

Do you rub.

 

Love

The idea, the word, the wish, the conjecture. High and low flying. The fog. Nothing easy or thought out but defeats you there, at the bottom of a series of rungs. Because nothing is so high-flying in our aspirations. Where dreams and bodies collide with such vehemence, a triumph is unlikely, only that fog. And the fog eats, or demolishes; because, somehow, that's what's chosen. Somehow demolition is easier in stress.

In My Mouth  

Love, the word: lush,

a summer night’s rain. 

Itself:

taut, brittle.

 

I had it on the end of a forceps;

bead of mercury, it escaped.

Love, the word:

I swallowed it. 

  

Art and poetry

                                               

                          Van Eyck: The Crucifixion with the Virgin and St John

  El Greco: The Crucifixion

 

       

Mantegna: Women at the crucifixion

 

 

Both, like plasticine, can be so malleable or, at the other end of the scale, so nuanced.  Small suggestions take you somewhere else: a new direction, a new discovery. So much is so possible from the same root. A new colour, turn of a limb may bring a new, altogether different image, as the magnetic words on the fridge quite randomly scatter into unexpected meanings, fresh ideas.  


 

Bacon: Three |Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

 

 

      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.