Precious As Lives Should Be

 

Bivalve shells

encasing lives:

magnificent lockets

ribbed and banded,

corrugated

and toothed shut.

Sublime

in design and plan

as befits

the preservation of life;

precious

even to blind nature.

Logical Chicken

 

then featherless chickens

saving the industry the cost of plucking

legless chickens

saving the industry the cost of their removal

wingless chickens

saving the industry the cost of bone production

beakless chickens

saving the industry damage caused by pecking

and on and on

till eventually billions of units like enlarged fists 

producing chicken meat

to the gentle sound of fluids streaming through plastic tubing.

Sunlight through the Trees

 

Coins of sunlight

falling from the trees.

Seeing, like fish

see them,

gyrating vesicles of air;

hearing their tintinnabulation

inside the wells

of our eyes;

gathering their scintillations

in baskets

that are a weave of synapses;

singing their light

back to the trees.

She Moves

She moves like water;

her dress a pool of sky

filling my bucket eyes.

I swim in currents

of her hair;

she does not know.

Tomorrow will condense

around her,

myself part of it;

she has made my life

a river of tomorrows;

I wait for her there.

A Memory of my Father

 

 

Shaft of sunlight, 

reflection off a million specks 

of dust, 

feeding his face with lines and grace

 – soft light paints old faces  

the friendliness of sweet Autumn apples –. 

Hands held down to his grand-daughter,

she looking up into his face;

the delicacy of the moment

as Vermeer would have caught it

in the light that spills down

from a hole in the clouds.

Soil

 

There is just a suggestion of mountainous terrain across the bay;

when, in the haze, they disappear so do I;

but a starling on the apex of the gable continually shifting the dial

along the short-wave is holding me present.

Sunlight is a strange thing. It lies, dead body on the patio;

takes everyone, everything down with it;

but it’s then the earth transmits most readily

what the sun is communicating.

Now the sun is counting my bones, registering their composition,

colour and structure; I, stretched out on a flag,

am almost reduced to clay,

the listening layer of soil.

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.

 

Days of our Lives

 o 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.

Friendship it Seems

 

Arms thrown open;

friendship it seems;

doubt it.

Too close to that face,

the full of your eyes:

a prison.

Self-Portrait

 

My self-portrait is a busy place;

a totem pole of chancers.

Face beneath face,

each advertising its schtick.

It’s late,

but still I’ll start again;

I must start again.

Closed

 

Gentians,

May’s bright eyes

were yours

but now those buds

have closed,

never to open.

Stripped of their tongues,

the mourners

file past;

the quenching

of your beauty

like their Summer repealed.

Dublin Launch of New Collection

My new collection, The Sound of Water Searching, will be launched by poet, playwright Vincent Woods at 8.30pm, Friday, March 25th in Drop Dead Twice on Francis Street. The launching will be followed by The Upstairs Sessions, a monthly night of performances of all kinds which never fails to entertain. 

I have, of course, notified Dublin Airport that there will be a spike in air traffic and Ryanair have laid on extra flights. I expect the ports will also experience difficulties, but it is generally understood that the launching is an event of exceptional importance both nationally and internationally. So, I recommend you get there early. 😉

 

In His Nature

 

 It is in his nature to shoot songbirds out of the sky,

                                               to enjoy that moment

when a bird’s flight becomes sheer fall by his hand.

It is in his nature to take pleasure in another’s pain;

    he can contemplate with satisfaction the damage

                        he might wreak with a broken bottle.

                       It is in his nature to be power-hungry,

 to gain a position in which to indulge his pleasures;

                         relentlessness is part of his violence.

Where the high soprano sings

 

Where the high soprano sings notes so pure

they might crystallise and glint in the sunlight,

these men are deaf as steel.

If only those notes had invaded their hearts,

that steel might now be ringing with harmonies

beautiful enough to liberate souls.

Her Fingers, Piano and Light

 A rewrite from last year.

Her Fingers, Piano and Light.

Her fingers on the piano keys: 

nails brighter, redder than rose-hips. 

                                                                                   

A net of cigarette smoke hanging, filled 

with the two of us and afternoon sunlight.

Room receiving the notes like a canyon;

momentary silences with flaring incandesence

                                                   

between fingertips, and piano notes again 

spill out like sequins. 

Brass and silver, mahogany, ashtrays and

antimacassars,

Liszt like a gold tooth;

green glints of sunlight from bevelled glass;

she smiles; the music twirls a cane 

with that jangly old piano aplomb,

fills the room till the walls fall away, and she 

with her deforming contours of smoke dissipates. 

I write to hold on,

but I may as well be catching steam.