Knots on the wires untying themselves,.
rise into the sky
like crochets escaping staves.
September swallows, restless,
must shed nesting order
as commas might abandon sentences.
Their Autumn selves must unfurl,
wheel, sweep and swoop; for tomorrow
they will trace lines of longitude.
I've tried to get this right before, my father on his hospital bed after suffering a stroke. A moment that has stayed with me, poignant and beautiful. My wife arrived to see him and that's where the poem comes in.
When he was beyond talking,
close to dying, you visited.
For want of words he could not form
he hummed a tune,
unrecognizable, tuneless;
and never was a tune more beautiful.
folded in a roll
above shoulders
the cape
with fabric loops
to hang light-weight
plastic stool
down human back
over fold-up table
and drawer
of ultra-light material
rotational
for mealtimes
above the waistline-
mounted laptop
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.
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.
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*
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
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
