Man in Man

 

Inside himself,

that’s the silence.

He lived

away from us,

from our view;

a complete union

of person and soul;

an isolation

we observed

even in his company.

We thought him incomplete

in our ignorance.

The Christmas I share with Paddy Kavanagh

When in ‘A Christmas Childhood’, Patrick Kavanagh writes,

“Cassiopeia was over

Cassidy’s hanging hill,

I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — the Three Wise Kings.”

I know exactly what he saw, me too one very clear crisp Christmas night, they were making their way in bright moonlight up the hill towards Scardaun not far from Roscommon town. I was astonished, they were so clearly outlined against the sky. God knows, they were a long way off course; with that sense of direction I'd recommend giving up following stars.

It was not hard for a child brought up on miracle-laden gospel stories, fairy stories, ghost stories, Celtic legends and Aesop’s fables to see three kings on the slope of a hill. With a lively imagination, a child might turn from the ghostly shadows in the corners of his bedroom to the distant horizon outside his window and know, categorically, that there are no borders; not between Heaven and Earth nor Ard Mhaca and Tombstone.

Sure, I watched for travelling stars at Christmas, and, come Good Friday, I expected the Heaven’s floor to be ripped open and God’s fury to be visited on the town in an horrific display of lightning bolts at exactly three o’ clock in the afternoon. Easter Sunday, I expected to see the beams of light radiate from between the clouds, the glory of God the Father extending out over the land.

In my childhood, the year was measured out in religious festivals, all of which had direct bearings on our lives. An apparition seemed to me to be a very likely event given the fact that our family said the rosary each night, and I was considered a shoe-in for the priesthood. I was petrified at the notion of God or Our Lady arriving into my bedroom full of flash and bang, and calculated at a very young age that my best chance of avoiding such an appalling possibility was to ditch the whole religion thing completely.

But the beauty of Kavanagh’s poem! He reminds us that the child of those days and that upbringing expected and saw the signs of Heaven in the world around him:

“The light between the ricks of hay and straw

Was a hole in Heaven's gable”.

His retelling of a Christmas morning in which his father’s music sailed over the fields to the Lennons and Callans, clear as water, and further, way, way, away, to the universe where the stars themselves were dancing to his tune. How he hurried into his trousers to be out into that Christmas morning, into a world made magnificent with the

“winking glitter of a frosty dawn”.

How wonderful it is to have memories from home so magical; how pure that dream flowing down the years of growing. And when those years finally turned over, and the boy was a man, how could he leave Monaghan behind him; wasn’t there a perfection to the old life? Wasn’t the spirit of the child as pure and brilliant as that Christmas morning?

And how could I leave Roscommon behind, and the magnificence of those same pristine, frosty mornings still sparkling in my head. Those were the mornings that filled you with such unexpected happiness that you broke into a run, the only way to disperse the energy that was surging up inside you.

And then Christmas; no question as to the magic. If it was a sun-bright frosty morning, Heaven was already smiling. And as to the wonders of the day, of course, Santa could fit down a chimney; anyone who can circumnavigate the world in a sleigh pulled by a team reindeers can fit down a chimney. At about noon the smell of Uncle Brendan’s cigar kicked off the festivities, there was a jug of orange squash in the middle of the dinner table and the lights on the tree were the stars taken down from the sky.

Sure enough Adulthood and geography make Christmas something else; life changes everything. What was magical is rationalized and the excitements of childhood find some other vent. But the well of childhood continues to pour out its Christmas gifts; the memories that colour my mind make the day special despite those distances. I rise a little later, and there’s not quite the rush to get down to the sitting room, but the day blooms into happiness, and there’s that same celebration of being alive.

Portrait

 

this way,

flesh pouring;

mouth agape,

teeth watching

there, there,

tumbling dice,

eyes unhitched,

plunging down

faster,

concaved cheeks

coil inward

to the perfect ohhhh

Explorer

 

Collecting your warmth on the palm of my hand,

explorer of exotic landscapes,

brushing over the warm skin,

the shallow arc of your back;

closed eyes; the sunlit concave of a desert dune

among the sun-warmed backs of dreams.

Our Days

 

Days: we grow into them,

eventually wear them snug;

you and I were different fits.

Days of mild disagreement

stacked one on the other

became disaffection;

passionate conflict

might have rekindled love

but ours were days of indifference;

we passed each other

without touching,

we went to sleep without a kiss.

Came a day when you said

you’d rather go out without me;

came the day when I did not care;

the day when you said

you’d rather live without me

and the day I did not care.

A Memory

 

I have a memory:

two lovers lying in a meadow,

a cosmos of May flowers;

their laughter swishing them

round and around

a bee-buzzing ecstatic day.

                            High up swallows tracing circles,

                            lavish displays

                            of their mastery of the air;

                            they watch with fingers entwined;

                            swallows too,

                            magnificent in their flying.

We don't imagine it

 

She holds her child in her hands,

barely more than a basket of bones light as twigs.

I see the anguish in her face, and try to imagine

the weight of my starving child on my hands

but cannot; I cannot bear to put my child’s face

on that emaciated body.

I will not bear her suffering, not even in imagination;

maybe that is why such horrors persist.

Quantum Exploration (as far as I can make out)

 

Each discovery opens the door

To a room more empty.

Converging to a point,

and it bugle-shaped to infinity.

Universe

 

Stars make space in my head.

Standing flying,

The universe without within;

Minute, infinite

I.

Harbour

Full sails once,

bulging with summer sunlight;

we would have gathered them in, eyes.

Geometries of whitened stone:

disused warehouses;

midday has lain down,

stretched out, listless beneath the walls.

Water that is lapping against the quay-side,

speak up;

what is the history of this place?

Entwined

 

Part river:

play of current on bronzed pebble-beds,

sweet.

Part stone:

tapping waters in the sound boxes beneath boulders,

their back-beat.

Part waterweed:

the choir’s descants ascend to high C,

the shape of it.

November Landscape

 

Sopping fields

green with water,

lush drumlins

sluicing November rain

down their soused sumps,

spewing stone-coloured cloudscapes

onto the road,

coughing up sozzled fences

from beer-brown drains

to hobble under their load of time

tunelessly

into winter’s torpor.

Escher style poem

 

Having arrived at my conclusion,

I embark upon a contemplation

of the issues.

Since there is nothing to consider,

I mull over them

and  reach the decision

that my ruminations are futile,

that I have already fixed

on a resolution

and that considerable forethought 

will be necessary 

for the solution I require.

Withering Peach

 

His face, a withering peach dried of happiness;

cares relentlessly tapping at his temples;

years spent yanking a livelihood from obstinate fields.

Still that skulking alertness, a hunger behind his eyes;

trigger-fast assessments, critical, begrudging;

observing the world with a lead-shot gaze.

The exertions of neighbours stored, bones for picking over

through interminable nights; nights that stack,

block upon block, building building hatred.

Hopelessly Adrift

 

Let’s say, I was to walk out in public bent into this shape:

it would be concluded that I was a half-wit;

from posture alone!

And let’s say my hair is unkempt and

I’m wearing a big black overcoat, hanging open;

people would cross the road.

If, on the other hand, I retrieve a kitten from the depths of the coat:

they’ll consider me harmless, away in the head,

still better avoided.

And, with all of that, if I appear to be perfectly happy in myself,

I’ll be discounted as a pitiful poor soul,

hopelessly adrift from reality.