The Wanderer

 

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich

Climb to the summit;

come closer to your soul. 

Traffic

 

I'm four years out of Dublin now and live in an idyllic part of Donegal. The change wasn't quite as dramatic as it might have been as I've been travelling up and down for years, spending weekends and holidays here. To say that the quality of my life has improved is an understatement and I have not regretted leaving, but I have lost something which I think this poem addresses.

I awoke to the usual rumble of city traffic

and quickly realised it was the sea two fields away;

for the first time felt the loss of a life passed; 

that boom of  activity was the myriad possibilities

daily breaking on my shore;

the roar of conflicting energies: the screeching, 

bellowing breaks, exhausts, pistons.

The cacophony of the streets, the pumping city.

I turned on my side to hear that traffic in the sea

                                              but it was not there.

Bejewelled

 

Diamond-beaded, stems

bowed under the weight.

All summer long, the yellow tips

blossomed, abuzz with bees;

now, in the slow drawl of time

following an August shower,

with the  sun trapped in a million droplets, 

it dazzles as though lit from within.

Bejewelled 

as Fabergé might have dreamed,

beyond any beauty I've  ever imagined;

beyond any beauty money could buy.

Coming In

 

White light

sluiced from trillions

of anemones’ mouths,

all open prayerful,

free-loading on the shoulders of breakers.

It flies and crashes,

pours into ravenous bays,

slaking cathedral thirsts

whose morning, pin-shaped eyes

high up on the cliffs have turned corundum

with waiting,

wanting.

Once Green

 

Even now,

with only vaporous memory of you,

I hear the clank of the shovel against a stone

as you dig the ridge,

see the manure on the graip

that you’re about to mix into the soil,

smell the groundsel whose roots

release so satisfyingly from the clay.

And cigarettes that would be the end of you,

I see the spiralling of their smoke

from your fingers

like each was a little dream

or the pipe lit and re-lit,

the friendly glow near your mouth;

an almost hobbit-like cosiness;

ah, those  green hours spent beneath the sky.

In the Clouds

 

The archipelagoes of a boyhood’s imagination:

the exoticism of islands so far east

they are unexplored expanses of the far west;

beyond them, flame-bright horizons, dreamers’ infinities.

Last evening, before sunset, beneath a sky, charcoal-blue,

Himalayan; above a misty-grey sea;

molten-magnificent and littered with low-lying islands

I found myself, again, looking out over those same South Seas.

That same enchantment, buried under years, unearthed;

a reminder that the age of exploration has not yet passed,

the excitements of childhood not yet spent;

an explorer may find limitless the wonders among the clouds.

Away

 

As a crumpled up page,

thrown there,

discarded;

in a vague way

the shape of the fist

that scrunched it;

a man

on a pavement

near a doorway

where cigarette

butts are strewn;

his face

bent close to his feet,

into his coat,

away.

What shape is our love

 

1.

What shape our love:

a circle I believe.

And what colour that shape:

buttercup yellow.

What constitutes the circle:

the village of our lives.

2.

We experience no gravity,

no ground;

when we step we fly,

when we fly we swim.

Dolphin-arced,

designed for infinity;

big and little hand,

we orbit the sun.

Still in Love with You

 

The sun playing the water;

I could hear those notes long after sunset.

Still in love with you was the song singing

 in the small hours awake;

that rise and fall,

the way the winds carry over the sands in your head;

how that play attaches to the nerve system;

how the choirs of sunlight sing you present .

His View on The Loss of Habitat

 

The loss of habitat:

“criminal”, he says.

“Not nearly enough consideration,

governments must do more.”

“A worldwide effort,

nothing less."

“Humans have been careless,

they've destroyed enough.”

He likes neatness,

his lawns to be uniform, green, carpet-like;

not a daisy to be seen,

a bee’s desert.

Sebald's Icicles

 

So when Sebaldus heaped icicles on the fire

and watched them blazing bright as firewood,

was it his faith in the benevolence of God;

had he sat in snow at -5 warming his hands by

curtains of icicles, stalactites with flaming innards?

Or had he a nuclear bent to his mind:

the emission of energy contained in crystals,

solar-induced bond dissociation in the ice lattice.

Did he foresee the nuclear radiance and the heat

that leaves people clinging, shadows to stone?

His Days

 

His days are the fields his cattle graze,

the years run from under his feet in meadows

of primrose cowslip meadowsweet fireweed: the months flying

till once again pools of sunshine, daffodils, defy February gales.

His evenings are the savage streets of New York, Los Angeles,

where he dodges bullets stumbling down fire escapes,

slips in slicks of blood running into dark alleys

then he’ll drink a cup of cocoa before flicking the world to darkness.

On a Sunday morning he drives the tractor into town for mass

and he’ll chat an hour or two over a pint in his local;

when he wipes the Guinness from his lips and walks out the door,

he returns to his days, the fields where his cattle graze.

She in her house

 

She in her house

converses a lot:

asks questions, answers them;

debates, argues;

always wins

the argument.

Her decor spare;

a tidy mind,

all planed to her liking,

stores pat;

a trim house.

Coming, going from her door

with the working hours;

has friends,

keeps them separate;

eventually they disappear.

She might be seen

passing a window,

then another;

always seems she’s looking

for something.

Early morning sun

in the front,

late evening round the back;

she in her house: 

a stone in a box.

No One Knows

 

No one knows

what wars were waged in your head.

That you were bruising on the inside was clear,

but locked up in silence ‒ a human safe ‒

only your eyes spoke and they of pain.

And hands shaking, cigar burning

precariously close to your fingers; a storm warning.

You, sat in our company; in your own private weather,

your own private sea.

Love

Let’s pare away what’s not needed;

carve it back

to the vein

running rich through the stone.

Not the media noise:

lazy visuals,

pulp pop.

Let’s remove, cut and cut

till we have it massive:

the elation we feel

lying side by side.