Exhilaration

 

The wind combing the grass silver,

tossing the heather;

the humours of the sky,

scowls and laughter,

tracing the mountainside’s contours,

a hunt at full gallop

through the gap.

The duns and greens, bright yellows

flitting light and shade,

carrying the atlas of the sky

over the gushing streams,

the ravines, the bracken meadows;

the exhilaration, fluid mosaic,

Donegal to Ballybofey.

Conductor

 

I draw the music from my arm,

it expands like an opening wing;

I extend what I cannot speak

nor hand over,

an iridescence of sound

that all but aches to be free.

When there is no way to convey

the beauty that is within you,

loneliness is the sentence.

Should I write a poem about you

 

Should I write a poem about you;

skin-tight,

revealing like a bathing suit

or a big coat

to keep you hidden

or warm.

Would you even like it,

my written portrait;

I stray into Francis Bacon mode.

Perhaps leave those bones unstirred;

maybe I should write about hands,

how they colour in Winter weather.

Napalm

 

Napalm.

Nice to feel the sun on my back,

to idle the whole day through;

watch girls passing along the beach,

thier beautiful tanned bodies.

Nice too, the sounds of the seaside:

a speed-boat buzzing out on the water,

the tide washing onto the strand,

the screaming children.

Storm ( edited version)

 

Spent all evening alone on the strand

watching a storm’s elbows resting on the horizon,

but now its shoulders are rising.

Once, God’s eye was the centre of every storm;

I feared the Himalayan masses of His charcoal-coloured anger;

they throw the earth to its knees.

The sea, wearing requiem black, is a writhing mass,

the birds have all disappeared down a hole

and the cattle in the fields are humming nervously to themselves.

I can feel a stinging in the molecules of the air 

as the clouds roll in on the wheels of their blue undersides,

coming, rumbling over distant rocks, coming.

I must hurry, lock myself away, shiny bright conductor that I am.

I must dig myself a burrow;

hide myself from the war-making God of the sky.

Marble

 

Morning.

Stretches her arm back to touch him,

his bed-warmed skin;

expecting the familiar response,

his finger down her backbone.

Touching marble; taut, cold;

her brain struggling to climb

to her hand’s discovery;

and turn; can she?

Morning.

It was a morning she knew might come

but the indifference of the stone shocked her;

turn; there is never a choice;

mercifully, his eyes were shut.

A Year of Flight

Seeds in June, nonchalantly,

like tourists

flying on the south-westerlies,

dawdling

where snowflakes in January

were hustled along

or the mists that spent days

‒ like looped film ‒

throwing shawls

over mountains’ shoulders.

Swallows plane lush lanes,

green larders;

later sycamore helicopters

flicker down

those same corridors

or thud, the crab apples

escaping with their summer’s booty;

globes of  pinhead lights:

fruit flies in pools of sun.

The spume cutting loose

from the waves

in Winter storms,

Guinness head rolling up the beach.

Aimless flight of gulls

in the high winds

chipped off the cliff-face;

above the houses, curdled cloud, 

charcoal crows,

disturbed people.

The Salmon in the Spring, the Hazel and the Hermit

When to give up? An edited version of a oem from some years back.

 The Salmon in the Spring, the Hazel and the Hermit

Into an open gob the hazelnuts fell,

so that over the years the salmon grew

into a colossus.

A day came when one nut fell plumb-line;

devoured complete with husk

at the very instant of its dimpling the surface,

it caused the salmon to spew from its intestines

the knowledge of a thousand years

that cascaded downhill

over the shilling bright stones,

through the ignorant meadows to the lake,

where it became part of an ever-shifting

circuit of water, weed, spume and silt.

A hermit, who lived by the lake,

dousing his face, drank some of this potion

and was instantly replete.

In time a hazel took root in his belly

and he convulsed

so that the stones unearthed by his flailing feet

filled the lake

and sent its waters flooding out

onto to the plain where the people lived;

so they, too, in their turn, drank;

and by this means knowledge and poetry spread

from the time that was before

to the times now and those yet to come.

That Final Trespass

 

That final trespass:

the undertaker preparing her corpse for viewing.

When I knock at the door he all but screams “don’t come in”.

She is now a commodity of the death industry.

Her taut face will hold the appearance of shutters pulled;

life folded neat as she exited.

Our Death Offering to the Future

 

Everywhere, humans altering the landscape,

not just governmental, but farmers, developers:

ourselves imposing designs on landscapes that

need follow their own evolutions or, as Darwin

might indicate, they become unfit for survival.

And so, the most transitory, those with least

claim to the future, gouging unmercifully through

nature’s processes, which include in their present

their future possibilities, persist in pulling the means

to live from under the feet of their grandchildren.

Beyond Einstein

 

They talk, panoplies of perception;

Picasso-like profusions.

Tourbillions, the stones’ eyes

as would reflect in Van Gogh’s skies

and mouths: plastic, scream-shaped

as Munch would devise.

Their thoughts run together;

disparate landscapes; maps;

fusions of time and space and dreams; 

beyond Einstein.

Woman at a window

 

A woman at a window;

her back to us,

still.

Window in a blank wall,

open

to the sea;

it flows into her:

the bay,

oceans, landmasses,

like air.

She rests,

arms on the window sill.

The Unifying Principle

 An updated version of a poem from 2018 that was inspired by Cagall's weightless lovers.

Love made us lighter than air;

we careered, wheeled and banked

above the town.

Time, gravity, all forces;

we were the unifying principle.

Curved like quarter moons,

fitting into each other precisely,

loving each other beyond norms,

we freed ourselves.

In that love nothing hurts;

in that love all is healing.

What Victory Looks Like In A War Cemetery

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In that moment

 

In that moment their eyes told everything:

the young woman in love,

the older seeing a young suitor hamming it up.

One smiling, the other concealing laughter;

in that one moment, in their eyes,

see how the broken wheel turns.