My Advice This November Day

Don’t be too fond of owning,  my little love.

As you fly;
let your head be full of the magic of flying
and happiness will be yours.
Be light as a leaf  among the millions;
such exhilaration!

This flight is your life, darling;
unique, incredible, finite.

Question

“What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in you hand
Ah, what then?”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems

Let’s drink to that.

"Need we say it was not love,

Just because it perished?”

― Edna St. Vincent Millay

We left through the same door we entered;

the seasons had moved along.

Neither of us turned to look,

the door was already closed.

Other people will stop there: a month, a year;

in our different worlds, let’s drink to that.

 

Unhappiness recreated your face

in myriad facets, as in a cubist painting.

The disarray made it ugly, but alive,

and that was another beauty.

Rain Fell

 

Rain fell.

It was not a dream,

but your voice

from the far side of the years,

sounding like sunlight on water.

If only I was prepared,

if I’d known such a thing could happen,

I would have walked out

to meet you.

Emigration

 

She went on a liner; we waved and waved and cried.

The ship’s horn blasted out its great bulky voice

and moved away from the quay. We watched her face

till it was indistinct, her frame till it was indistinct,

the throng of passengers hanging over the rail till they

were indistinct, the ship diminishing in size slowly slowly,

till no more than a dot on the horizon, and then it was gone.

I looked at the great emptiness that is the ocean;

it was the same emptiness she was leaving behind her.

Not such a death for her with the warming promise of her future,

but the saddest for us who watched her diminish like a birth rescinded.

November Poetry

 

In the park, the leaves of another year have turned

to rust, fallen, rotted and been cleared.

The flower bed at the centre of the lawn is bare,

as is the children’s playground; the coffee-room

is boarded up and a film of water has darkened the colour

of everything: tree trunks, foot-paths, benches.

November’s beauty is not great splashes of primary colour

nor nature’s pretty embellishments, but the textures

that lie beneath them, even the lowered sun throwing

shadows from the unevenness of the ground.

My mind too is shaded by November.

Less distracted by obvious beauties, I search with narrower eye

among the austere denuded trees for patterns

of growth along their barks, of bud-beading,

of the varying strategies in the splay of limbs to capture sunlight.

I have a more artful eye, that bends more quickly to deeper thoughts,

turning sod and light inwards; 

I rework the detritus of the passing year, 

work those textures into words.

Blank White

The oblong page: blank, white;

I turn it ninety degrees searching for inspiration,

catch sight of you at a side window;

note you do not wave.

But, seeing the exotic landscape behind you,  

a renaissance backdrop,

I decide, bird of paradise, to fly there, 

flare among the branches.

Vacuous occupation, the page declares;

look here, here is your reflection.

Waving

 

It was not the wave from the door, but,

when she’d turned out of the gate, looking back,

mother was still there with a second wave,

that, like an exchange of vows, was love

declared, over and over, with the simplest gesture.

Great milestones of her life started there;

her ever-growing steps towards independence,

all blessed with that wave, a warm pullover of love

to wear wherever the steps were going; and knowing too

that those achievements were always tinged with sadness.

Emptied

 

Emptied.

The house.

Home.

Gone.

Those years.

That life.

Numb.

The walls.

Myself.

Fork in the Road

 

Page:

a confessional, a dilemma;

what will I say

dear blankness?

Somehow a page is too white to be truthful,

and fiction is a betrayal;

every time I confront the white page,

I 'm at the fork in the road before honesty.

Life

 

A stone skimmed across the water pauses a moment

to imagine wings.

In the same moment a mayfly, among half a million

wings flickering golden sunlight,

is gathered into the jaws of a granite-speckled trout.

A man in an artist’s workshop is studying the camed

window of a mayfly’s wing, marvelling at its beauty

at the same moment; the trout’s teeth crushes the wings

that flickered golden sunlight.

The stone sinks.

At Lough Eske

 

I am part of a lake becalmed. Sitting here, oak woods my collar,

feet paddling November leaf litter, mind deep in the reflection

of tree trunks; further out, the tracery of their ash grey branches

grading to the cumulus ruminations of an overcast Donegal sky.

I am among those branches, an intricacy of neurons, still as a blackbird

considering the world from a height; song silent now, but full inside;

I am among those trunks, quiet nimble-eyed fox peering out from shadows,

brimming with the present but with only the faintest gleam off my scales.

The Walls of Inis Oirr

Among Ireland's most beautiful and impressive sights are the limestone walls of Inis Oirr. Fields paved with  karst limestone cleared to a labyrinthine landscape that's just incredible to behold. The walls for the most part fall into two categories of construction: lace walls and Feiden walls. You can get a good description of these walls at https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-stone-walls-of-ireland.html

The Walls of Inis Oirr

How these walls speak, like poetry, of the land and its people;

how carefully the stones, like words, chosen to fit,

how beautiful their construction, coloured to their place.

The stone that paved the fields, now brimming with sky;

the lace walls of Inis Oirr, nets for seaweed fertiliser,

alive with limestone clouds chasing powder blue patches

across stanzas laden with western light, air and water.

Or feiden walls with their tightly packed words leaning left,

then right; words rhyming with themselves and their landscape;

for all the world, like a singsong on a bus coming late-night from

the pub, as close to merry as ever a poem could ever be, and still

following the lilt of the land as Yeats might have dreamed it.

Dog-eared Memory

 

Your face distorted

through the rain-running glass;

shop lights

flowing down your hair and shoulders;

the harsh neons,

the dull tungsten tea-coloured;

Main Street mermaid circa 1967,

the town a cascading shawl.

When I search through the files,

the dog-eared memories; thumb right through

to the darkest corners of my mind,

that’s all I can find of you.