A Culture Night Miscellany in Rathmines

I'm really looking forward to joining  Kevin Hora, Maggie Breheny and Anne Marie McGowan for A Culture Night Miscellany of poetry, music, story and song in Rathmines Town Hall on Friday, Sept. 16th. And it will be a particular pleasure to welcome fellow poet Jane Clarke to Rathmines College.

2016 has been a good year for Jane, but, then again, all the recent years  have been good for her. This year she was winner of the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature 2016 Ondaatje Literary Award. Her first collection, The River, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015.  In  2014 she won the Listowel Writers' Week Poetry Collection Award, the 2014 Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition and was  shortlisted for the 2014 Hennessy Literary Awards, as she was in 2013. I don't have to, but maybe I'll stop there. Suffice it to say, she is a cut above........., but then, like myself, she does come from Roscommon.

Jane Clarke

Do we torture what we don't like the look of ?

Marine.

Prostrate on the beach,

a slop of sea pulse,

a glob black as chewed tobacco

fallen from the lip.

My mother said -

the sea is sick,

it's breath on the beach is bad

and its puke is scattered

all over the sand.

She said

all its pin points are boiling,

its stomach heaves;

that it will yellow our skin

if it gets half a chance.

Then this morning,

when something with small eyes

came out of the sea,

I pelted stones at it

till the tractor came.

Old Man

The tyre hanging in the garden

is proof that children used to  play there;

but in the breeze it’s a shaking head.

Today snowflakes flying by

leave the sycamore white on its northern side.

The garden is still: no snowman, no footprints.

The tyre is an old man;

with an old voice, he explains:  

“I cannot remember names; truth is

I hung too close to the trunk to be of use;

the sycamore branches bolted upwards;

to this day they’ve never spread out.”  

A poem with a Mantegna painting

The Lamentation over the Dead Chris

Mantegna, in his lifetime, was criticised for imitating sculpture: the loss of warmth that could be achieved in painting from real life. In the case of the dead Christ, however,  it is the marble of  the dead body that makes it perfect. The perspective draws more of your attention; then the suffering, fixed  stone-like in the image, fixes it in a similar way in your mind, and  it remains there: indestructible marble.

I am fascinated by the cold solidness of corpses; always drawn to run my fingertips down the cheek of a dead friend or loved one. The memory stays in my fingertips, and, somehow, it helps to know that the person is now changed to stone.

  

The Viewing.

Dead: the colour of old cream,

his eyes shuttered shut;

so neat, besuited and slim,

weight he lost dying.

They made a basket of his fingers

with a rosary spilling down;

everyone said he looked lovely

but then I touched his face

and it wasn’t him at all.

Goodnight to my wished for lover

Goodnight, 

goodnight.

̶.  I’d like to smash goodnight down onto your head

                
and with those stars write

love messages across your sky   ̶.




Goodnight.

The Fire

A passion/a destruction. I am in a fire. I am the fire. 

It is a place. I am within it. 

It is a destruction. That will give.

The fire defines me. I give it coal. 

It gives me.

A Brief Note on an Imminent Famine.

Everyone here will starve:

each bone will be a stripe,

each hand a bowl,

each leg a stick.

Then there'll be the gluttony

of cameras:

our threadbare skin 

will be devoured,

our eyes exported

shining like pickles.

A Snagging Memory

Before The End.

The bedside lamp shone

in the pool of her eye;

it made her teeth translucent,

runnelled her face.

Daylight and I were reluctant visitors;

the  room smelling of trapped breath,

sickness and decay made me anxious

that I might inhale her disease;

and all I loved gone,

all dwindled down to duty.

Fragile Nature

Interference.

A fish is dreaming,

elbow deep.

With my fingertip

I draw a herring-bone

across his heaven;

he bolts.

Now the lake dreams,

empty like a canyon.

What Does He See Where I See Only Stone?

What does he see where I see only stone?

The man is still, his gaze fixed on the ground

but that gaze compels you to look again;

in such  moments a mind might overreach the stars.

I see my reflection, he says;

I see my hair no longer covers my head,

its silver ring above my ears, he says,

is like gorse cleared from a hill-top.

And, he says, I see the child struggling

in the young branches of childhood,

the school doors fanning him on and on

through corridors of captivity, a whirligig

through years, disremembering his own footsteps.

I see the would-be lover, and he loved his hair;

he put a shine in his eye like I polish a shoe;

and his full bracelet of teeth; my God, he could smile.

I see how time subtracts: aging dreams

till they become hobbled old goats that have outstared you,

till they have become unbelievable.

My young loves reflected back have their young faces still

but I would be afraid to see them now.

My plans and projects are shunted, rusting old carriages;

I don't visit them anymore.

The old man's arms are folded so fingers lie like stripes

on his right arm, forage in the dark woolen sleeve

of his left. His head is slightly forward,

his eyes unblinking as though entranced

by weeds growing on the floor of a pond.

I see too that I never held the reins of a life,

that indifference is a colander, indecision has the grasp

of a hand without fingers. Days are punched down

like receipts onto a nail; named, counted, collected,

they grow into months; life flitting across the pages 

of a calendar, falling  into the holes between Christmases.

And I remember those Christmases

long ago when I was young, the totting up  ̶

over a drink   ̶  of departed faces and the wishes,

the wish-bone skinny wishes for the coming year

that smouldered beside a glass of stout and then went out.

I see those faces whose roots entangled with my own,

how arrogance blinded me so I could not see

it was the carpet of their roots that buoyed me up

until recently, feeling them slip away,

feeling the cold gaps they’ve left around me, I discovered

it wasn’t I that put the colours in my head,

and with that discovery much has toppled

that hindered my view. I see, as though from a height,

my head is indistinguishable from all the others

rushing like froth from this life that we call

living.

Now his face is raised, his eyes red-rimmed

with the racing bobbin that’s in his head:

I saw the ground and the scuffed toe to my shoe;

a lifetime might have no other measure than 

its number of worn out shoes.

Thou shalt not

THE GARDEN OF LOVE

             

    from Songs of Experience by William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love,

   And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

   Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

   And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;

So I turned to the Garden of Love

   That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

   And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

   And binding with briars my joys and desires.

The same theme appearing in the myth of the Piper’s Stones: piper and dancers lithified for having defiled the Sabbath; it refers to the change in culture on the arrival of catholicism in Ireland. A number of neolithic stone circles inside and outside Ireland are referred to as the Piper’s  Stones.

from ‘Above Ground Below Ground’

In those days the piper played the music of streams:

fast flowing runs, sprays that erupted in feet,

blood hitting high C, dancers whirling dizzy with life.       

Then a new order.

That day on Brewel Hill, piper and dancers broke the Sabbath,

angered a god, who having decreed that music-making was subversive;

had gaiety transfigured to stone.

Athgreaney Piper's Stones

The Less Trodden Ireland

Every year hundreds of thousands of tourists travel from Dublin to Galway, a distance of 208km (130 miles). They come for a taste of Ireland: atmosphere, heritage, scenery and fun. Often with the hope of connecting with the authentic Irish experience, they cross from one nest of customized attractions to another. The journey takes two hours and  fifteen minutes.

In  doing so, they pass some of the most unspoiled, most interesting, less crowded and most authentic Irish experiences they could hope to  find. Archaeological sites, ruined monasteries,  castles,  heritage centres, stately houses, grand gardens, not to mention tranquil lakes, winding rivers  and panoramic views across the central plain.

On these two maps I have pin-pointed about 60 attractions across a particular, and less visited swathe of the country (not nearly the full list). All of these places would appeal greatly to me, all are worth the detour and most require no payment. This is not an attempt to provide informed itineraries for visitors to Ireland, but to make the point out  that it will pay the traveller to explore more deeply between the tourism capitals of Ireland.

Sites include Russborough House, Castletown House, Trim Castle, Fore Abbey, Loughcrew, Belvedere House, Leap Castle, Corlea Trackway, Strokestown House, Boyle Abbey, Arigna Minning Experience, Clonalis House, Athlone Castle, Hill of Uisneach, Rath Cruachan, Roscommon Castle, Athenry castle, Carrowmore Archaeological Complex and many more; check them out, it's a wonderful list.

Bridge Life

It was, of course, bridge life:

the monk-like garb of old men,

their herring-boned elbows on the parapet,

at home with those ancient lichens

and warmed by their burning pipe fires.

They were limbs of trees left out for the cutting;

softened by rain, hardened by wind,

they were brittle grey grained men

whose conversations flowed in runnels

pocked with their growls and their laughter.

And it was the river flowing, weaving

their childhood and old years into a tweed:

a comfortable cloth, their cloth, the cloth

to warm their bones when the wind comes

that makes old teeth chatter.

Leaving

Loch Ryan is Pink

Loch Ryan is pink.

Stranraer is curling up in a corner

with its people shrinking inside it.

I'm watching the hills' colour draining away

so they become just shadows of a land.

Only the gulls are real and even they

look more like discarded wrappers.

I am looking back over the stern

with the wind pouring down the port-side,

a wisp of the emigrant's sadness blows over me.

This receding shore to another Irishman

might have been Lough Foyle or Cobh or Sligo

and the light at Malin or Tory might

have been the last twinkle before the ship

buried itself in the Atlantic darkness.

The last beads of land would have been treasure

to be stored but instead they are like water.

As the day funnels even further to the west

Scotland makes itself small; somehow it  seems

to be leaving us; turning away. The ship's trace

is a luminous wake and a highway of smoke;

you, who have left no trace, are already forgotten.

I imagine them homeless on board a Christmas tree

bobbing on an ocean between two continents.

A Sad Week

It is the week of the Nice atrocity;

beyond the Gap, I see,

draped over a roadside memorial stone,

a tee-shirt flapping in the wind.

Elsewhere, a man decides

the universes of eighty-four minds

must be obliterated;

eighty-four lives to the wind.

How men assume themselves God:

make plots of hatred

where there were gardens of innocence,

conjecture bullets as seeds.

My most sincere sympathy to the relatives and friends of all those who died this week.