Mirror Image

She looks at herself,

and, rather than passing on,

remains in front of herself,

returning her stare

returning her stare.

Time has scribbled on her face,

the script has halted her;

intrigued, horrified,

she has stopped to read

she has stopped to read.

Time’s graffitti has betrayed her,

she sees her story on her face:

time vandalised her beauty;

she turns away

she turns away.

Corporate World

The dull paths of our lives:

sat at desks, endlessly clocking up

corporation minutes, whose sponge-like

insatiability drives us through our days;

propellers rotating at the speed of

managers’ whims; incentivized with

carrots of preferment, in fact, further

enmeshment in their cogs, deeper commitment

to the captivity; to become a presenter

of the starving statistics, those graphs

with ever-widening jaws hidden behind

the oh so convincing lines.

And you,

with family, far away, withering in the drought

of your time, the young imaginations fired

by the lightning flashes of the natural world

doused by your distracted interest,

your removal from their wonders.

And the inevitable hook from your carriage

onto your world of office, desk and air-conditioned

ambitions, your soft-padded shuffle through life,

your highs and lows doled out by those

who have experienced the thrills of more spacious offices.

Baking

The flour falling from her fingers

‒ into the child’s memory ‒

and her fingers coated in flour.

Reacting with her skin,

tomorrow her hands will be red,

raw and sore;

and still there will be fresh bread for the table.

Nature Done and Dusted

Lough Eske, carelessly thrown beneath the Bluestacks;

if my mother was here, she’d say ‘pick that up, fold it and put it away.’

And how do you think Lough Eske would look folded into a rectangle?

‘Tidy’ she’d say (I’m doing her a disservice mentioning her here),

but tidier still behind an interpretive centre with paved walkways,

playground, benches, coffee shop, garbage bins, signposts,

parking spaces for buses, tourism statistics on an ever-ascending curve,

local politicians queuing for photographs beside  ‘Lough Eske Recreation Park’.

International Conferences, brochures, signposts to the future:

Namibian Dune-Surfing, Amazonian Canopy Adventures;

the whole wild world folded into neat tidy rectangles;

explorers lined up three-deep at the ticket kiosk.

The Colour of Her Eyes

Low tide,

a vast expanse of strand

extends to the distant shallow sea;

its shade barely more than the memory of blue

and one bright line.

Two people walking there

remind me of a past happiness;

too far out to leave more than an impression,

too long ago to be sure of what I’m remembering;

but those eyes, I’m definite about the eyes.

Watching snow fall

into an already snow-covered garden

is so similar to the experience of sadness

that it is utterly compulsive

Void

less than

desert or wilderness;

less

than nothingness

is the void from loss.

Something scooped out,

removed,

a diminution.

Loss

irrecoverable, lamented.

Playing Granny’s Old Piano.

When I was young I used to play that jangly old piano;

the notes went round and round the insides of the instrument

like I was playing in an empty hall or in a canyon.

In those days I had some ancestors still living,

who, multi-coloured birds all, perched high up on the escarpments,

listened, and encouraged with calls that blossomed in my ears,

blossom still; rare blooms, I didn’t know that then.

I will never out-perform the Michael that played for them.

I listen to this album to hear those notes; the old hall, jangly piano;

high up, wisps of old birds still cling to protruding ledges;

higher again, the sky squats, tone-deaf and waiting.

Inside the dark places

Inside the dark places

between the branches of trees,

grass plants in the meadows,

crevices in walls,

beneath floorboards,

under the stones on the beach,

grains in soil.

What strange formations,

unlikely growths, exotic creatures,

unexpected confluences;

flashes of light, strange stirrings,

fearsome predators,

unexpected symbioses:

the world is full of unexplored wildernesses.

So I sit here

So I sit here in Arrivals

waiting for ideas:

hedged-in country roads, taking the poetic route,

meandering around drumlins, ponds, farms;

scarves of air-borne sand,

whole beaches streaming like signals pouring

out of short-wave radios;

arrogant jet trails whose firm purpose and direction

dissipate in lamentable short-term memory;

desert highways

where wisps of Merle Haggard

catch like wool on the roadside scrub;

ideas borne on words, carriages on wheels;

so I sit here in Ideas

waiting for arrivals.

A Young Woman's Death

Her young body and beautiful face

laid out;

and the file of mourners grabbing

for metal girders inside their heads

to steady their consternation.

None of us there had ever seen young beauty

dead;

as the people passed,

their eyes flicked like window-blinds,

and all were suddenly disabled.

I searched for words:

could I say how beautiful she looked

or what a waste of a life?

The silence of her closed eyelids filled the room;

there was no space for words.

Cloud, caress her face

with droplets light as pollen,

salve her eyes,

lighten the blue you find there;

bedew her cheeks

like time blown back from childhood;

whisper into her ear

that the world has, indeed, grown more gentle.

Lough Graney

Tonight, this surface gifts the heavens to us;

isn’t it exquisite?

I’ve always wondered how you could leave this place;

what finer existence could inveigle you?

Between lake and sky, soul stepping clear of body

is instantly ecstatic.

Did you imagine that there was somewhere the wings

of your heart would find greater span?

Here the soft insistence of eternity enters your soul;

time bows to beauty.

What the Nighttime Brought

This countryside, known for its emptiness, was, after the hours of daylight,

filled with a darkness so impenetrable we viewed it with fear and wonder.

And when the wind streamed into the night, it brought with it all manner

of creatures, monsters, ghosts who guffawed, screeched, clanked and roared

in the hedgerows, the trees, took possession of outhouses, clambered over roofs,

slithered under doors, howled down chimneys, loitered along the roadsides.

Few had the gift of seeing into that dark, but old James Guihan saw. In our kitchen,

he told us of the mad woman who walked the cur wolf on the end of a rope,

came into our garden on September nights to steal our apples, and the Pooka’s

red eyes that sometimes flashed in at a window, so children must stay in their beds

because those eyes lured boys and girls to the undergound homes of fairies from which

they never returned. He told us about the banshee whose wails presaged a death,

and the lowlifes whose trade entailed their poking in the hedges for strays and runaways,

and his warning that only our night prayers kept us safe in our beds.

Still, night after night, we braved the bedroom window, the thinness of its glass,

to gaze into the pitch-blackness that chased our days away. We looked out

to where the familiar fields had been, trees we climbed, the sheds that were our forts,

saw nothing, and were terrorized by the uncertainty of the world we thought was ours.

The Walls Below The Mountain

The walls of old fields are everywhere,

walls that counted bones.

Feet dug into wet earth, knees bent, backs arched,

boulders raised to waist height;

carried to walls, walls growing, knees bent,

knees straightened, arms bent, arms straightened;

feet dug into wet earth, knees bent, backs arched,

boulders raised to waist height;

carried to walls, walls growing, knees bent,

knees straightened, arms bent, arms straightened.

Beneath the cling film of skin,

the clank-free movement of levers

and hillside cleared by slow degree;

in this way they daily hauled the sun from east to west.