After Hiroshige

 

A peacock on a branch,

waterfall.

                      Along the Tokaido road

                      a wave,

                      landscape rearing above a lake;

                                                            

                                                              a display, magnificent,

                                                              like a peacock on a branch.

Autobiography

 

Here’s the wind that brought me;

here’s the day that sang;

here’s the grass that was my mother

and there the trees that taught me.

Here are the hills that were my dreams;

there’s the river that aged me

and this is its silt upon my face.

Here’s the bay that sought me out,

the mountaintop I must climb is beneath it;

that is where I’m headed.

from a bus window

 

He’s standing on the corner,

a busy city junction;

he has walked from his house,

but………………...

and doesn’t know why he’s there

nor his way home,

recognizes no one

so….………….…….

he’ll stand there

where four streets disappear into a fog;

there's one he must take;

which………………?

Bohreen

 

Bohreen*

Burgeoning spring growth,

the hedgerows of hawthorn, hazel and elder

ankle-deep in profusions

of primrose, celandine and vetch

bowing towards each other over the bohreen,

claiming the light if not the tar.

Swallows, sleek as fighter jets,

bulleting down the narrow corridor,

skimming our heads,

wheeling behind us to come again.

Bends along the way revealing curiosities:

a bed-end stopping a gap,

moss-covered walls along cow-dunged lanes,

an ivy-draped ruin, pre-famine cottage

featureless but for the fireplace,

and those potato ridges on which blight-

blackened leaves once signalled starvation

still there, grassy corrugations in destitute fields.

Cattle with chomping jaws lift their heads

to watch us pass with quizzical stares;

all around beauty crowding into our eyes

birdsong and the sounds of fields filling our ears

and yet, behind it all, even now,

there’s the held breaths of the departed.

*boreen or bohreen from the irish word ‘bóithrín’ meaning a narrow country road

I would like to recreate the earth so

 

we may throw snowballs beneath showers of cherry blossoms;

put speakers by the pond to waltz across the water-lily pads;

strip off and swim in a field brilliant with poppies;

stand thigh-deep in the crook of a river collecting scintillations,

bring them home gleaming magnificent in a jam-jar;

walk that trail of moonlight all the way to the opposite shore;

climb the clouds towering Himalayan above the horizon;

run on feet of wheels when our heads are light with happiness;

live in the landscape that appears in the rear-view mirror.

Wanting

 

We sit here

running

open-mouth aggression;

rolls of flesh ugly,

back alley

tongue-out desiring;

dung-drain

fingering,

cornered, boxed;

deformed

into ourselves,

gut-red;

blood-curved,

womb homed, cartilaginous

wanting.

I think love infinite

 

I think love infinite:

stretching back to no beginning

onward to no end.

Having the most complete happiness

life can offer

makes the present limitless;

that completeness of oneself

through loving

makes an infinity of each moment.

The Pleasure

 

                    You                                                          video

                                                     green

                                                                                            faded

                                                                                                                              water

                                                               slide                                               peregrine

                                                                                  lisp

the waterfall has been full

                         white

and loud

                          reminding me of long hair

                                                      and

                                                   city-park                           face-down

                                                                                   carefree chat

 forgetfulness                                                                      pleasure of being us

Songlines

 

We sing the landscape, ourselves in it as we are, have been and will.

We sing in every language since no race owns it

and we sing of all times since landscape and time are wedded.

We sing its wellness and our singing makes it well;

we sing of the stars for they are the bright eyes of our ancestors

and we will return to them.

We sing the songs of stones and water, of deserts and fields;

of ascending and descending, of hardship and achievement, dreams

and wishes.

We sing the songs that are the floating contours of the planet, the northern

lights of the heavens; we send our songs across the world like universal fly-fishers;

we send them lightly and ask you to find them for there are no hooks

and when you do, sing for they all make the one map.

Cannon Fodder

 

Mired in the contradictory propaganda of enemies,

the stultified masses become the pawns of presidents

and governments, who, like medieval overlords, claim

jurisdiction over their lives and send them to war for

no imparted benefit but the political capital of those who, 

directing the course of annihilation from the rear, without care,

 send them to their deaths and the subsequent reparation 

of  wrapping their remains in the flags of their dreaming.

Becoming

 

Carving, relentlessly carving; the days sculpting,

long past physical peak, my most essential self

from the imposed, simulated, protocol-conscious

construct of employment years. Shaping the truer me,

daily experiences building my Alexandrian Library,

shelf after shelf filling as I would have them filled

so Goya, Hopper, Bacon, Bach, Pink Floyd and Myles

flow by my stones into my torrent; Du Fu, Kavanagh,

Whitman harmonious with Donegal’s shoreline and skies

and I may finally settle to my own frequency of life,

resonating with my own pleasures and designs.

When I have nothing to say

 

When I have nothing to say, to write;

I imagine a white expanse,

a space to be filled;

it always forms a rectangle, a page in fact.

I wait for an idea to appear in that emptiness;

and, sure enough, something arrives, sooner or later,

like a stage coach on some remote winter road

in a Dickens novel.

First, a dark spot in a snow-covered wilderness;

I wait for it to take form.

Is it a herd of yak on a Himalayan slope, that stage coach

bound for London or is it a spot of mildew?

When it draws up it may not be a poem;

in fact it may have destroyed it:

the pristine white emptiness;

the untrodden field of freshly fallen snow.

Rossnowlagh, Christmas Eve

 

The ferocity of the ocean dissipating on the beach;

its heaving waves falling flat and disappearing so I

am walking along the edge of its anger, in spume

turning into mice scuttling to the safety of the dunes.

Thousands of miles of Atlantic violence; bared teeth

in ranks lunging landward, spittle flying skyward

like savagery unleashed, uncontained, uncontainable;

white rage, jet loud, breaking powerless on the strand.

Happy Christmas, hoping the new year might see an end to the uneashed, uncontained savagery of 2023.

Life at its most horrific

 

A truck over-loaded with pigs

reversed to the abattoir door.

The men dropped the ramp,

opened the tailgate

but the pigs stampeded away

from the space, climbing backward,

frenzied, into the melee of bodies,

screaming.

Beaten with sticks,

struggling to go forward, still jerking

their bodies back into the torture;

away from the stench of death,

back to life,

even at its most horrific.

Travels

 

Sun nested on the water,

Himalayan cumulus above the horizon,

a stratus sea,

a silver road to the moon;

sky and earth mimic each other.

I survey a polar wilderness,

a vastness above me;

sometimes the sea is limitless with sky

and is infinite;

I am Marco Polo, Cook or Shackleton

and there is so much that is unexplored

beyond this window

that these travels are epic;

unimaginable wonders roll in on the wind;

my eyes are nets.