Abuse of Power

 

A large man, despondent with his life;

I got that despondency full in the face

almost daily for disremembering my lines;

which, of course, I could never remember

with the fear of that punishment coming.

Cruelty was the currency in education;

discipline through fear;

their weaponry included leather straps, bamboos,

legs of chairs, even a billiard cue,

and sarcasm to dent where a strap couldn’t reach.

They hoarded family histories for future belittlement,

retained memories to settle old scores,

retaliated down the sibling line. They decided,

over and over, in the cultivation of their pettinesses

who would succeed and who would fail.

But this abuse is not in the past, it’s in a different place;

an adapting, evolving infection.

Look for it down different corridors;

find it where respect is allocated on dictate,

where empathy is a flaw.

Stone

 

We hooked our fingers through the eye of the stone

and pledged ourselves to each other.

The earth was our witness.

It was the stone of the gathering, Cloch an Aonaigh,

and we were the most recent.

It is said that those who look through the hole,

in a state of grace, see heaven; when I looked, I saw you.

In a countryside of stones: crosses, cross-pillars,

cairns, megaliths, stone walls, stony mountainsides,

pledges made are consecrated in stone,

even the great earth movements are signed off in fantastic

scrawls on the schists of Skelpoonagh Bay.

Her Fingers, Piano and Light

 

The fingers that played the piano with nails

varnished bright as rose-hips are gone.

Nets of cigarette smoke held afternoon sunlight

suspended around us.

Room received the notes like a canyon.

Fingers reached again for the cigarette,

and light spread in slowly deforming contours.

Piano notes poured into the room like sequins;

faraway sparkle now,

and those fingers are gone.

Storm

Spent all evening alone on the strand

watching a storm’s elbows resting on the horizon,

but now its shoulders are rising.

Once, God’s eye was the centre of every storm;

even now these Himalayan masses of charcoal-coloured anger

seem to throw the earth to its knees.

The sea, wearing requiem black, is a writhing mass,

the birds have all disappeared down a hole

and the cattle in the fields are humming nervously to themselves.

I feel the molecules of air around me are like fireflies;

as the clouds roll in on the wheels of their blue undersides,

even the rocks appear to be sentient.

I must hurry, lock myself away, shiny white conductor that I am.

I must dig myself a burrow;

hide myself from the angry God of the sky.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

                                                                                                                Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

Looking like a nightmare passage: 

a drowning,

or perhaps he’ll plummet headlong from a rock-face.

Should there be a wreckage washed up on those rocks?

Seeing too much, too clearly can make one blind;

I almost see the cogs turning inside his skull, 

like a mathematician’s,

give me, every time, the person who can work it out,

who sees the other pathways in his head.

Broken Keys

The city traffic keeps going like a bicycle chain, and the clowns in the circus walk on giant

beach balls. I never look out the window, but it makes no odds, the thing keeps going.

Whoa, she played till the keys were flying off the piano like slates in a hurricane;

avalanche of blades in dust; will she be there when it stops, I wondered; she was, picking

crystals from a lunar landscape that, for all the world, were bits of her broken surface.

That night a meteorite, flashing across the sky, stopped above my house to wonder

where it was headed. In that few seconds, it lost its momentum, the flame went out

and I saw it no more.

The Fugitive

The one-armed man will arrive into town, most likely by train, the train runs two fields

behind the house, Kimble will be on his heals; he had that twitch that I worked on.

I would jerk my mouth into my cheek, I had it perfect, practised in front of the mirror;

especially if there’s girls around; no one would guess that there’s a secret press behind

the mirror; it’s got a nice smell; I often open it to get the smell. The grassland over the tracks

was the place for men that had to keep moving, I could lose myself there. Cowboys ride

that vast emptiness, stopping here and there to slake their thirsts; I like the way they sweat,

the Virginian sweats a lot. I know the water hole just beyond the line, there’s a tree there that

I kitted out as my fort; my stash of stones; indians and germans creep through the grass,

and indians crawl up the embankment to ambush the train over by the elder tree where I get

my swords. It would be hard to see them; you can get a good view standing on the buffer.

Jesus threatened to come off his cross at three o’ clock on Good Friday. Mam hated thunder,

we said the rosary during thunder storms; men on bicycles were always getting struck by lightening

over near Tremane. I’d go into the cubby hole under the stairs, past the box of polish tins into the pitch dark.
There was a door there that opened into a cave; I keep some secrets in the space under the cylinder
in the hot press; I don’t think anyone in the world knows that hiding place is there.

Resolution

Of course, across a lifetime, there are disappointments:

wrong choices of words or actions; misunderstandings,

misinterpretations, mistakes. I’m tired of old shadows

that belong to past, those I still drag into my days. Why

blight the present with regrets I’ve already entertained 

for too long. The next time they come to my door, they’ll

find it locked.

Better to be in the colour, light and life of now. To be

ravenous for all that is beautiful and uplifting, and be

sated. To be, all senses, full throttle; to shunt worries

up a siding, and be full express through the joys of life.

Life, the greatest gift, flies; I resolve now to fly in it.

October Leaves

October leaves on the footpath and pond

were galaxies, star-shaped maple;

colours of evening, hearth colours;

of a year whose duties have been seen to;

of hands when the deal is done.

Russet, reds, yellows, browns:

colours of contentment, of retiring.

In November they were rotting, blackening

in sodden heaps, turning rapidly back to humus,

my October stars. In December they were gone,

but had left hand-shaped traces all over the path,

waving back, those happy souls

The Four Strings On Her Violin.

A tunnel, in which she flitted like a bat with no more than a candle

and a breath of wind coming from somewhere further along,

where heart will explore in search of.............................................

of darkness; with limited life; search until pointlessness.

Second: a meteorites tail blazed across her face, made her magnificent.

All the faces in the auditorium were bulbs, all switched on, all magnificent;

and some cried, and the tears were seeds of her light.

Third, sandy beach: contrary, mix of gleam and dull gray; saw edge,

bilingual, grit between the strings, speckled, pocked. And its sharp edge

of sunlit sea.

Fourth, the arc of a day. From cumulus clouds down to the domes

and spires of the city, she flew time measured in the passing of the sun:

the sharpening and blunting of light. Clouds here and there interspersed

with the blueness of infinity, and day, the unit of our lives, lived in the

sound she was creating right there, in front of us.

In the Lagoon

Sun shining half-heartedly backwards into a sulky sky;

you may come upon me, lost in my beard,

drifting oarless in the lagoon, surrounded by trees

drooping listlessly into the water.

There may be a herring gull perched on my head

scanning the shore with avaricious intent

and perhaps a verse of poetry written to my memory,

in chalk, on the side of the boat:

‘He was a poet of meagre talent,

verbiage yes, rhyme he hadn’t.

Could pick an image, lacked rhythm;

just didn’t have it in ‘im.’

The Moon is a Blood Orange

The moon is a blood orange:

half devoured, rotting,

lolling just above the town.

A shade of Autumn ripeness,

of succulence

as Caravaggio might picture it.

Like a blown rose’s tarnished beauty,

like young love, its transience 
prompts a blissful melancholia.

Silver Birches

Today I came on a stand of birches

dazzling in late evening sunlight.

A tableau of, maybe, a dozen nudes;

splendid, shameless.

Torsos of Elginesque splendour,

arms twining upward in Grecian gracefulness;

statuesque beauties

nonchalant in Olympian lasciviousness.

Re-election in A Time of Death

A privilege of money: access,
access to everything.

To presidency?

Of course.

At what cost?

Cost?

A privilege of money:

the meaninglessness of this question.

Night Light

Night Light

Aerial photographs: night-light of the human sprawl,

cities’ cancerous creep.

Our web, spun across the globe,

corralling wildernesses, removing their essence;

grotesque with carcasses rotting in its threads

and its promise of a planet empty of all but us.