The Exultation of Larks

And what a stream is to the sound of water,

are larks to the air.

Their effervescence all around

as though life just discovered;

the intricacy of their trills,

far beyond the capabilities of any pianist’s fingers,

is exhilaration.

In the light and colour of a summer’s day like this,

far from vainglorious cities,

their song reaches deep into the soul,

finds the excitement that is our birthright,

draws it, shining, upward into our day:

life rediscovered

amid the exultation of larks.

Mount Rushmore

When as now, a president asks

what a country can do for him,

looking longingly for a place

among the exalted,

my best advice is:

turn the bible right way up,

go to Matthew 23:12 and read,
“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled”

Feichín's Response to the Women of Omey

On hungry mornings, Feichín became a cormorant,

dived deep into the Atlantic to retrieve miraculous numbers of fish.

On the rocks of Omey, he often caused commotions, standing,

arms extended, skin stretched tight over bones, naked as a newborn chick,

drying his body in the wind.

When, once, the women of Omey delegated one of their number to go to him

to chastise him for his sinful displays, which, their souls being jeopardised,

must be the devil’s work; he, upon hearing their complaint, reached up to a shelf,

took down the bones of a meal and asked,

“Do these bones offend you?”

“No”, she replied.

“Was I not more clothed than these?”

and with that he took a switch to her and sent her running from his hut.

Hey Darling, there’s something I wanna tell ya.

I was coming out of the Big Boulder pub on the edge of my desert;

there was a trail in the sand like someone was dragging a bag or

somethin’.

I saw that it zigzagged up yon dune, so I

followed it.

Over the shoulder

and onto the next, and the next,

and the next, then a gravel track that led to a stretch of open scrub;

more dunes, up and down,

past chalky skeletons, rusted motors, hoary old tree stumps;

I guess there was a change of climate out there.

A donkey’s head on a post laughed as I passed;

sometimes it’s hard to know if donkeys are laughing,

but this guy wasn’t all there.

I followed the trail for hours; at sunset, lay down and slept,

slept solid.

Next morning I followed on, over a sea of sand,

later some dried out riverbeds,

until, guess what,

I arrived back at the Big Boulder.

I’ve gotta tell ya, I’ve had this half-molted anaconda

skin hanging from my knees for ages. It’s a total drag.

And you?

How about you?

How’re things in your desert?

White Space

Tramping this white space, over and back, over and back,

craving encroachments:

mildews, moulds,

suggestions, shapes, anything that is not nothing.

It becomes clear that space spawns its own confinement:

a compulsion to fill it.

Soon enough the junk comes flying;

and it becomes, in fact, a very dangerous place to be.

To Think

We sail a wedge into the space

between sky and ocean;

in turn, while one sleeps,

the other holds the sky aloft.

I strike my thoughts against

each other, but there is no straw;

so I sing to distract myself,

though, in truth, I am no singer.

Earrings

On the summit of K2

I will build a cairn, steady the longest step-ladder

in the world, and climb to gather the purest, finest, most

perfectly faceted ice crystals the high skies can deliver, to

make you a pair of earrings. Two arrays of crystals, in which each

one is measured to a round fraction of the next, like a minuscule set

of tubular bells. Then I will ask you to come north with me to where

northern lights pulse, for there the earrings, resonating, will hum

stratospheric into your ears, notes so indescribably beautiful

that you will forget the crush of this world around you,

experience loneliness so exquisite that your return

will be almost unbearable.

beAuTiful asSyMetry

Five fish in a pond looks better than six,

as do five beech trees on a lawn.

I’d

rather not have tulips dotted regularly around the borders, thank you,

and I’m thankful the icebergs in Greenland are

not all cubes.

For

that matter, I’m beginning to tire of perfectly straight teeth.

A play of spotlights perhaps

 

August winds jostling the clouds along,

springing random blooms of sunlight, outbreaks

of vivid green fires along the mountainside.

Brilliant illuminations of colour with irregular margins

interweaving with the darker stands of fir and spruce.

The smile of playful movement brimming over the ferny

slopes, down to small emerald fields below the foothills,

down to the bay, where the gleams are returned,

like water, to the sky.

I am a Swallow

I am a swallow,

a living arrow.

I cut straight through air,

flash down country lanes,

hedgerows fluidify;

I wheel in an instant if you are before me.

I am a scissors:

I cut arcs through the blue sky,

see the glint of my passing.

I am the big hand of time;

the earth is my clock face.

Days of our Lives

So we’d have a coffee, maybe two, then off

into town by the side streets, looking for

red-brick houses with lilac doors and yellow

window frames. Drop into the IFI, sit over

another coffee, browsing the catalogue with half interest,

the steady drift of film-goers and idlers with more.

On down Dame Street to College Green,

enjoying our navigation of ever-shifting crowds,

the dexterous manoeuvrability of ourselves.

In Hodges Figgis we’d scan the poetry

shelves and the art books, those names and titles

settling in our heads like we were travelling the

world: Heaney, Mahon, Carver, Balthus,

Kahlo, Lorca, Basho, Holub ‒ dabs of fresh paint

and print to keep us informed for a month or two ‒

before returning to Grafton Street to knit crooked stitches

through the crowds, stop a few minutes to hear a busker

play a saw or slide guitar then around to Tower Records

to be tempted by some new ECM arrival in the jazz section.

George’s, Aungier, Wexford, Camden, Richmond Streets;

the diminishing scale of a city’s architecture, and

the backwards walk down the telescope to the landscape

of our normal lives. Crossing the border at the canal, with

its familiar vista down Rathmines Road to the mountains

beyond; we, like fish, breathing easier in our own habitat,

saw our hurdles flattened, but, perhaps, never recognized

the days of our lives?

That beautiful odyssey: Saturdays, mid-morning to mid-afternoon;

or maybe it was just one Saturday,

or, maybe, it wasn’t at all.

Klimt Moment

We’ll sit where we sat before, above the stream,

watching the golden eels of sunlight dart and shimmy

above bronze coloured stones to the sound of water searching

out all the possible solutions to the conundrum of strewn rocks

while somewhere beneath us a hollow-sounding tock tock

drums our time away.

Let us weave time and stream into a cloak, a Klimt creation:

magnificent flowing, yet enveloping us in a precise moment

of pleasure. Let us hold it in our eyes so we may see it, wear it

when times are harder, these moments scarcer and the glint

of gold more precious.

Well

It was a barracks of an old house, the upper stories

well on the way to ruin, the lower a little way behind.

The eighteenth century kitchen flagged and dim;

its only light, through a small grimy window,

fell grey and listless onto the floor. When the back door

was open, a small out-house threatened to tumble in.

Outside, a cobbled yard that backed onto a wood of beech

and oak; itself threatened by briars and nettles; home to one

item of modernity, Tom’s black bicycle, leaning against the wall

with the air of just having come from or be about to go to town

for groceries, chops, tobacco; and opposite it, amidst encroaching

greenery, the well.

How to describe the magic of the well in that tumble-down yard:

its decrepit wall cracked and mossy, hemp rope with bucket hanging

down, dim distant eye forever staring. The lowering of the bucket,

clanking as it went, a faraway splash and clear cold water recovered,

as though we’d lifted it from legend, from depths that were unfathomed,

from the jaws of monsters no one would dare to imagine.

Rag Tree

By water, a river reaching the sea,

its journey’s completion.

Beneath a tree, contemplating the leaves

pilgrims have placed on its branches:

pleas for help by the river

that has achieved its ambition.

Roscommon Town Then

My Roscommon is gone since the seventies. Town

of small shops: Finns, Morris’s, Smiths and Kerrigan’s.

Main Street: Raleigh bicycles leaning against the houses,

open hall doors, shop awnings, fair days and processions,

aroma of fresh bread mixed with fresh print from Nelly

Higgins’, rolls of fabrics in Donnellan’s old shop,

Anglias, Prefects, Wolseleys, Zephyrs and Cortinas,

scarved heads, flat caps, walking sticks, evening papers.

Behind the shops another world full of magic and mystery,

exotic haunts and hideaways. Storehouses, disused stables,

barns, slaughterhouses, grain-stores, tumble-down sheds,

ancient gardens, abandoned workers’ cottages and these

filled with the wrecked remains of more distant civilisations.

Skeletons of mangles, weighing scales, churns, carts, battered

display cabinets, old counters, rusted motors, bicycles, prams,

assorted crockery, old glassware, scattered ledgers and coins.

Not now, the old street picked clean as a fish-bone on both sides;

the mysteries long forgotten under the sprawling car-parks, new 

entrances and that dull predictability of modern shopping developments.