Croghonagh

 How many paintings did Cezanne paint of Mont Sainte-Victoire? In different light, from different angles, at different times, in different seasons, different weathers. 

I look at the Gap and see the mountains change chameleon-like through the course of a day, much less a year. Irish weather is as changeable as it gets: bright sunshine alternates with rain frequently, not in a season, but in a day, an hour. With the shifting clouds, shifting colours; shifting cloudscapes. In driving rain, the mood changes: darker shades seem to bring darker moods. In mist, the mountains become vague and mysterious; suggestions of other things.

All in all, this place is a dream for landscape painters, but for poets too. 

Croaghonagh at Barnesmore in Donegal from a particular angle is a fearsome-looking cliff, from other angles less so. But with the never-ending procession of changing weather types, it seems almost alive. I wish I had the painter's skill to convey this, indeed, I wish I had greater skill in poetry to achieve it. But that, of course, hasn't stopped me yet.

Croaghonagh

This morning, cloud

streamed as jauntily from its neck

as any scarf that ever trailed

backward over a 1920’s Roadster.

At three, threatening

fiercely,

it glared across the valley

with a thunder-rolled brow.

After sunset, the light reflected

off the burnished

undersides of clouds,

dressed it in a burgundy evening gown.

Come dawn, it will be transparent;

birds lighter than seeds

will glide through its space

on elegant outstretched wings.

.

Five Winds.

The first throws fits;

vents his frustrations down telephone wires,

leaves nuts and bolts scattered all over the sky,

never cleans up.

The second lives in the hawthorn hedge,

stayed there all Christmas long,

brought soft drizzle to soothe a world in need;

dampened down the edges of noise;

left silver haws shimmering.

The third, a wind of the high sky,

keens an impossible pitch,

close your ears or you will mourn too.

Fourth, and most annoying, one that steals the sun's heat

when you've removed your shirt on the beach,

and still has the gall to leave you

inside the picture of a warm day.

And the wind imprisoned in an abandoned house:

kicking the doors, swinging in the rafters,

panicking in places no one can find;

a wind beside itself with the terror of its own company.

A Moment of Brilliance

 

She has a delicate face;

casts her eyes downward;

I noticed her mascara;

her eyes would be the brighter for it.

I saw the crescent of her eyelashes,

the curve of her cheek;

she was not speaking then

and did not know I was looking at her.

I was slightly behind

and to one side,

and formed an opinion

based on that view alone.

I fell in love

based on that view alone:

the delicacy of her fine-boned face,

her downcast eyes.

To me, they spelt gentleness or fragility.

In life, there are a few occasions that are urgent,

that are, like the lighting of a match,

brilliant flashes.

On a park-bench

 

On a park-bench, listening to the sound of leaves falling,

he became, suddenly, aware of the sound of heartbeat inside

his chest. The lub-dub of valves closing, then of the flow of

blood through those chambers, out into the arteries, and

around the labyrinthine vessels of his body.

The city silenced, the traffic that had flowed along the three

sides of the park now stationary, he was aware of himself

being present as he had never been to himself before.

Among falling Autumn leaves, a man sits in a state I’d almost

call ecstasy while the city growls continuously around him.

Razor Wire

 

She said,

I must wear my pain like razor wire,

but when you see me,

you fail to look beyond the wire.

When I say, I live deeper,

come join me, you’ll enjoy it;

you make it a fence;

you wear my pain like razor wire.

The Finest Poem

 

Spare:

the page.

‘How do I

fill such a space?’

a question to no one,

and no one answers.

Maybe the space is

the finest poem,

the infinite idea;

the poem

that dreamed itself

into being.

into being.

Zaknthos

 

Faraway the sea was a night-time city.

I stood unsteady, too much wine;

faraway the sea was shining in the moonlight.

Closer, by my hand in fact, a string of lights

on a clothes line,

a string of lights like a harbour-front on a Greek island.

Zaknthos, but that’s years ago;

the restaurants down by the harbour,

people passing in droves, waves of warm night humour,

boats jangling

and a quartet playing its way up and down the strip,

bouzouki music to clinking glasses.

My legs gone to rubber,

recent rain reflecting light from watching shrubs;

I would have sung, but it was far too cold.

Happy Christmas. 

An Ending That Isn't

 

Your life in all its magnificent capacity

to imagine and dream, plan, remember,

learn and know, create, innovate, love,

be so vital to so many, care and give,

support, achieve, fix, build, persevere;

now, today, reduced to the gruelling task

of maintaining a flow of air into the bellows

of your lungs.

Stop.

A bellows maintains a fire; it has no purpose otherwise,

and your breathing has no purpose now.

Rest.

Rest, let us continue;

we will carry you on.

Trees

 

Dark on this side, silver-white on the western

and seeming to bend under the weight of sunlight,

but, like beech leaves closing their palms,

the branches curve away from the wind.

The intricacy of trees exposed in December,

belying an apparent haphazardness,

here there’s a consistent angle in a tree’s branching,

there an upward sweep of branch-endings.

Beyond, topping the hills, now hay and rust coloured,

are windmills, Calvary-stark against the winter sky,

and they too harvesting energy, trees as we would design

them; spare and artless.

Going Places

 

That way, Ballybofey;

that way, Donegal.

Across the Bluestack mountains, Glenties;

to the east, Castlederg.

But in the direction I’m pointing: Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Draco;

the faraway places, the intimate places;

places I’ve dreamt of,

places I’ve taken refuge.

Roads that arrive,

more that never do

criss-cross

that plain.

I’ve hitch-hiked

since a boy;

those roads are straight and endless,

and take you

not to where you want,

but to where you need.

 

Love makes a meteorite

of lovers,

their world its trail.

What brilliance;

what a zenith!

Part of us dies

 

The fields told their stories

over the walls, through the thorns;

whispered their secrets to silver roads

who, humming like telegraph wires,

carried them to the neighbouring parishes.

Stories that hung dancing on rowan trees

or carried lanterns into the earth;

some were left to simmer in springs

or sent burbling down into silt-filled ponds;

many still mark the earth like ringworm.

Ours, the kith and kin of Garrypat, Bully’s Acre,

Páirc an Easa; that mosaic of landscape,

familar, once, as our parents’ faces,

whose stories, our stories, are no longer heard

but are lost under the roar of passing traffic.

Alone, together,

 

Alone, together,

it seems we all remember our deaths.

Could never be everything to each other

no matter how great the love,

knowing too well the solitude coming.

Forgive me.

Landscape

 

Lifting the cup to your mouth,

I see the old water courses, dry;

parched ridges, infertile now;

desiccated trunks and limbs, forests once;

the semi-submerged human habitations

hazy behind the skittering dust dervishes

that haunt the place.

I would kiss your hands.

Her Gentleness

 

         

Her gentleness was healing.

Friends came when they were low;

she lifted them

back into their heavens

to twitter and wheel,

smile down at her.

Down to where,

watching over their worries,

she gazed up,

encouraged, smiled back at them;

spent her childhood

                 longing for their wings.