Your hands, gentle,
resting in their usual place
on your lap,
listening to our conversation.
Fingers interwoven,
a basket for your thoughts,
the shape of caring,
the warm nest you made.
How wise those hands,
saying nothing
but alert in contemplation
and ready, always, to open.
 |
| Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich |
Climb to the summit;
come closer to your soul.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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 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
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
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.
