Days are the harvest of time. Each a segment
of film-strip lit with its own light and,
for all the weight that fills them,
thyey are delicate as the dandelion seeds that stream in
their billions through a bright summer’s afternoon.
Turn your palms down; look at the parchment
on the backs of your hands; a certificate of life.
You carry it; it stays with you, ends with you;
a reason to celebrate, for today all our days are this one day;
it is an exhilaration to be.
In death it’s often the hands
cranked square immobile
hold the eye;
held solid
that dead soul.
Ah, the hands that could
catch love
now stoney
My father in a beam of sunlight from the kitchen window,
the rest of the room a dim background; hands extended,
bending down to his granddaughter, minute particles of dust
glistening around them.
Vermeer-like: an intimate moment made still and lasting in
a slant of light, a gentleness isolated from the moving world;
a glimpse to slow the pulse, stop at the pool of a mind,
contemplate the heart.
The intricate weave
of their rhythms
glint and ripple
glitter and flow
sometimes loud
sometimes low
I sit through the early hours
listening
to the stars’ music
across the carnival of the sky
those haphazard harmonies
making an ear of the eye
Outside, in dim night light, smoking a Christmas cigar,
looking along the front wall, the angle it makes with the eaves,
the dark triangle at the top of the down pipe;
exhaling a plume of smoke, watching it diffuse beneath
that geometry, the smell of Christmases long gone.
Faces, faint holograms now, waft on that tobacco thermal.
Viewing them coolly in the dank air, those that carried me to now;
life a succession of relations with others,
the rise and fall of characters through my own story,
lights that shone, dazzling or dim, and lights that went out.
They smile, talk and laugh, settle cups on saucers, swish whiskey
round crystal glasses, roll cigars along lips before lighting.
I watch them: acts and scenes on stages that are gone, my boarded up theatres;
watch them, essential links, coffin-bearers
and stubbing out the butt of my cigar, return to the lights in the house.
“I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part of God.”
Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reclaiming
the occurrence of all things
in myself;
as close to God,
unfettered
as the free circulation of air;
being
as the sensations of all living
pass through me.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Each discovery opens the door
To a room more empty.
Converging to a point,
and it bugle-shaped to infinity.
Stars make space in my head.
Standing flying,
The universe without within;
Minute, infinite
I.
