Fifteen Irises from my Black Humour to You

Fifteen Irises from my Black Humour to You.

 

The mallards go off like a shot gun;

each a storm of wings

and black as a keyhole.

 

The pond, empty now,

is gripped in a glacial sulk.

 

Fifteen irises from my black humour to you,

their shadows only;

the pond will part with no more.

Stone Art

 

 

 

 

                            Stone at Newgrange photo by Johnbod. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Johnbod.

 

 

A man is carving shapes:

spirals, lozenges, chevrons;

the sun is looking over his shoulder.

Below, in the valley, the Boyne passes

 with a glint from its teeth,

the whitethorn is in full bloom,

the daylight hours are long. 

 

His hands are leather from handling flint;

a wave traverses the stone,

arcs toss on the crests,

they tip left then right;

tonight the moon is tipping left;

in three weeks daytime will be at its longest.

 

Words of Undiminished Relevance

The following passage features in a new show, 1916: Visionaries and Their Words, which was devised by Lorcán Mac Mathúna and which will be performed this weekend as part of Tradfest. Follow the link for details http://www.templebartrad.com/artist/1916-visionaries-and-their-words-sun/

“I put it that what education in Ireland needs is less a construction of its machinery than a regeneration in spirit. The machinery has doubtless its defects, but what is chiefly wrong with it is it is mere machinery, a lifeless thing without a soul. A soulless thing cannot teach; but it can destroy. A machine cannot make men, but it can break men.

Education has not to do with the manufacture of things, but with fostering the growth of things. And the conditions we should strive to bring about in our education system are not the conditions favourable to the rapid and cheap manufacture of ready-mades, but the conditions available to the growth of living organisms………………..”

“……………I knew one boy of whom his father said to me: ‘He is no good at books, he is no good at work. He is good at nothing but playing a tin whistle. What am I to do with him?' I shocked the worthy man by replying (though really it was the obvious thing to reply): ‘Buy a tin whistle for him.'”

Patrick Pearse in ‘The Irish Review’ January 1913 

Pearse’s words seem to me to be particularly relevant today. My experience is that, in the interests of satisfying the requirements of the marketplace, accountability, transparency, point-scoring, and being  politically correct, we are replacing the heart and passion that is required for real education (education that inspires) with a process that has more to do with commercial production and the maintenance of the attendant statistics.

The relationship of teacher and learner is a human one. Its success is based on the teacher’s ability to engage, with warmth and passion, the student’s interest.  A committee-horse system of education, over- prescribed and requiring a stifling degree of regulation leans more to the requirements of its own over-bearing institutions than it does to the people it is supposed to serve.

Trolls, Kings and Other Solitary Souls

 

 

 

 

 

Many years ago, while on a geology fieldtrip in Norway, I had an interesting experience that clarified for me the origin of those ever so popular trolls in the tourist shops there.

One day, while mapping in the mountains, I came into a very remote and lonely valley that had at the far end of it a single stone cottage. A strange sight in that remoteness, I walked towards it to investigate. But as I approached, I saw there was an old person bent over, working at something on the ground. I approached slowly and with growing apprehension. The person seemed totally unaware of me and continued at his or her task.

Being in such a wilderness, so remote and alone, all the possibilities of the old fairytales solidified in my mind. A childish fear flooded over me. I moved towards the forbidding spectre, heart in my mouth. It wasn’t until the last moment that I saw that it was a gnarled old tree.

As did Patrick Kavanagh in his ‘Christmas Childhood,’ one crisp moonlit Christmas morning, I saw the three kings travelling up the hills outside Roscommon. It was a magical Christmas sight, and I stopped to look at it for a long time.

Now I am looking out at some scattered hawthorns on the slopes of the hills above Barnesmore. They pitch themselves against the winter gales and flaying rain. They stand, rooted in boulder strewn, thin soil, crabbed old codgers with tobacco coloured dead bracken all about. On another day, when the mist is heavy, they bend into the wind and prepare to walk. For eons they have passed travelers on the road without a word, or maybe they have lisped some message that seemed to come from souls long since departed.

Visceral Art

The best art sends you away carrying some of the mood the artist wanted to convey, but you  have to be an active participant; in the case below, you must imagine yourself in that confined, airless vault. 

 

 

 

A friend’s conversation on the German artist Hans Holbein sent me back to his work, in particular, ‘Dead Christ Entombed’.

Not the only artist to depict the dead Christ to extraordinary effect, (Mantegna’s brilliant ‘Dead Christ’ with its jaw-dropping perspective is an obvious example), however Holbein has gone for the horror of the real in a way that distinguishes it from the others.

The undignified image of our stripped God is usually softened with closed eyes, a coterie of mourners, a cloth that drapes down artistically. Not here. This God is stuck, eyes wide open, in a vault that is unbearably claustrophobic. His beard, stiff in rigor mortis, accentuating the lack of room, his mouth open as though death came in the effort to get one last breath from this sliver of space. No details spared, prominent  belly-button and bump of genitalia, discolouring wounds, the all to human anatomy.

The hand at the centre of the painting has the usually absent, but here deadly accurate, colour of bruising; the nail-hole like an eye, eyeballing the viewer. This is a man with all the shocking vulnerability that can be portrayed in an emaciated human body. 

If I was a painter, I would retire after painting that.

Ending

 

 

He, who covered my body

with snail-trails,

whose hands were wrack

swept over my skin,

kisses on my back

a colony of shell fish.

 

He, who would have crossed a mountain range

for an hour between my thighs

now crawls over me

with wizened passion.

Gutted of love,

he comes clawing,

scavenging; 

and insults me with lies

that have made greater pincers 

of his mouth than his hands.

 

What does he see in me ?

 

Meat to excite him,

his groper's desires,

even his fingertips betray him.

But no more,

the erotic becomes ugly,

decrepit manoeuvres disconnected

from their original meanings;

the touches stain you.

 

I have watched him slither from my gaze

a thousand times a night 

while slipping the word love 

from his vocabulary;

watched him develop this communication

of knives and forks.

Eerie art

Reflections in puddles and pools can throw reality into the most unexpected compositions of forms and colours. Juxtaposed with the watery medium's actual surroundings, the resulting artistic effect can be stunning.
I find this to be  particularly true of bog holes. The spare beauty of the landscapes, the bleakness of winter skies in Ireland, the suggestion, (since they tend to be oblong, rectangular), of an ethereal grave. If I stop to look, I'm likely to find myself  absorbed into melancholic thoughts.

Bog Hole

 

Mute Michael laid out on water

shivers like a flag.

 

Fissures of sky rake him,

his mouth worms.

 

Night, extinguishing the bog cotton,

finds him alone

 

treading visions,

dressed in bottomless black.

 

 

 

 

Detail from painting by Elaine Leigh. 

Who Has Seen the Old Men?

Poverty makes  old look older.  Clothes become outer skin. Identified by their clothing, faces become unseen. We discount the clothes before there is ever the beginning of engagement with the person's face. And so, having dehumanised many of the most needy, we can live, happily avoiding the poverty on our streets.

 

 

Who Has Seen The Old Men?

 

Who has seen the old men

getting their suits

tanned to their backs? 

 

Ghost of a check,

button-holes frayed,

crew-cut threads.

 

Years worn on face

and on cloth;

the cloth becomes the face.

 

And when the Summer colours

come clashing

on the young, 

 

who will see

the old men

in their ashen clothes?

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.

 

Magical Fore

 

 

This is Fore. It is one of the few places I know where a stone building sits as comfortably into natural surroundings as though it were a limestone outcrop. Fore is a place of outstanding beauty; the ruined Benedictine abbey actually succeeds in drawing  attention to the peace and beauty of the valley around it. The immediate impact comes from its lack of commercialization; it comes on the traveler as something magical, something that  rose from the green fields beneath it. There was a time when Clonmacnoise had the same magic, but poor and tasteless development put an end to that.

Consequently,(and not surprisingly), some magical myths have grown up around Fore. Here are the 7 wonders of Fore: the monastery in the bog, the mill without a race, the water that flows uphill, the tree that has three branches/the tree that won’t burn, the water that won’t boil, the anchorite in a stone and the stone/lintel raised by St Fechin’s prayers.

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.

 

from Painting Women

 

 

                         Balance 

                                                                                                                                              a brushstroke tips it

  

       He adds                                                                                     counterweights

                                                              

                                                                                                                                                        corrects

  

                     She arrives                                                                by bristles of a

  

                                                              brush          

  

                                                                                  a construction                                                                 of
     
   light

  

                                      acrylic

  

                                                                                                                         on  paper                 

Where the poetry comes from

Reflection and dreaming, in a nutshell.

Where The Poetry Comes From

 

Fathomless blue;

blue sky. 

Two swallows proclaiming it

are extravagant 

dancers in an empty ballroom.

A church bell chimes 

two, three, five o’ clock;

no matter. 

Tracing curves to unending time;

a route to south Africa?

Fathomed true;

Blue sky.

With You

   

The fields, green with snow

under an apple blue sky; 

you, brimming

winter’s brightness, 

turning cartwheels;

your whole body grinning. 

The silver trees of our breathing

in full flower; 

my golden happiness

in being with you 

till the shafts of shadow

turned purple at sunset; 

       and our hours together

       colourless at parting.