He can’t experience anything above
the city racket, his head’s a bag of
loose spanners. Never being able to
find a place inside to be himself
driving him to violence, he pushes
the volume up further to drown out
the noise, sending himself spiralling
towards craziness, his only way with
people, and, in truth, crazy youths have
their admirers. Having no other mode
of being, he considers himself wild and
often is, and when he is not he’s often
cradling his head in his hands.
Green fields,
green the colour of water;
an ocean locked in place
beneath a grid of stone walls.
Lens, curvature of the planet,
green out of sight;
water
pinioned for grazing.
On Oxford Street a woman, falls straight as a Christmas tree
onto the pavement, suddenly dead in pink coat and hat, handbag
firmly clenched and eyes wide, staring at the sky.
Walking behind her, part of the morning throng, I had noticed
her purposeful walk, her style; a country-woman I concluded;
and then she was quite obviously dead.
The crowds flow past, she’s a boulder in their stream.
I consider in an instant what must be done, what is right,
and consider it long enough for it to be someone else’s consideration.
Barnesmore
An Bearna Mór
A river runs through,
a road runs through,
the wires run through,
the wind runs through,
the rain runs through,
the snow runs through.
The moon stops,
its chin in its hand;
its mesmerising stare,
its silver gaze filling the pass;
nothing stirs
but ever so stealthily, the river
stealing the light away.
To the farthest reaches of your skull:
a universe.
But, away, never;
you are always travelling within you.
from within the wreath of that life,
from within the nest of your arms,
from within the blanket of your care,
from within the fire-glow of love,
I have grown from us then to us now,
I have taken you, in coexistence, onward,
we are as one as we have always been.
Listening to Árbakkinn by Olafur Arnalds featuring the voice of Einar Georg I am struck by beauty of the voice, the ability of an older voice to stir the heart. And not lessened, maybe enhanced, by not understanding the words, this is one of what could be a number of responses.
Voice
His voice was a thirsty stream
picking its way down among the rocks,
troubled slightly by the coins
that once cheered its passing.
It must have been a poem,
it wasn't my language; he spoke
as though watching his parents fade,
as though they were now reduced to a hand waving.
She stands in her kitchen, turns, sits,
and feels there should be something,
there must be something.
But there is no other voice in that house
only the incessant radio gabble; she has tired
of it long ago; the repetition,
her brain on its spit; fatuous conversations,
contrived controversies, feigned remorse.
Or daytime television with its seeping mildew of cheap
dramas, old westerns and World War II;
a hundred channels, she can flick through a hundred
channels before throwing the useless remote away from her.
How can life have reduced to this nothingness;
she addresses the question to brain inside her head,
and it as voiceless as the house.
Drab, his room, like a prison cell, north-facing,
swill coloured; depressed outhouses crowded
into his window, a man-made fungal growth;
tea-coloured light oozed from the bare bulb
into his soul, till it too was of the same paint.
One day, he broke some daffodils in the park,
picked them up and brought them home;
left them lying, a rag of sunshine on the table.
Sunlight at last; he went back for more:
crocuses, tulips, ivy, grasses, bluebells, lilies.
Now a flower- bed larcenist, his room an explosion
in a paint factory bedecked from ceiling to floor
with all the flowers of the season, and his soul
blooming in colours that were, once, no more to him
than litter strewn across unkempt suburban lawns.
But as seasons passed and flowers died, unsatisfied
he learned to grow beauty; bulbs, slips, seeds.
That magic took him from his room to the library
where the tendrils of his research spread to faraway
places, and he travelled with them.
Books littered his table; a scatter of ripe, fallen fruits.
Sunlight poured upward from their pages, exploded
in firework blossoms all the way up to the ceiling,
all day, as though he had turned the house around;
and, in a way, I think you could say, he had.
Her mind
brimming with plans and schemes,
calculations and wishes,
possibilities of all sorts,
worries and cares,
memories you might keep in a music box,
pictures; movies, old and new, and never made
are box-offce in that Roxy;
the smoke-like tendril from childhood that loops about her,
those beautiful thoughts and philosophies
dreams, old loves and glories,
secret places like streams that play music on coloured stones,
or wells lost beneath ferns;
her creations, the wonderful, the zany;
her knowledge and learning,
her files, research projects, best or broken practises;
scaffolding half built on half built ideas;
the far reaches beyond plains, mountains, rivers and seas;
and cupboards she keeps locked on the shady side of the moon;
I hold it in my hands
while she has her eyes shut
and sleep is setting in.
i
Shoals of fish leap
gleaming over the water:
sunlight stampedes.
ii
A running child
imagines
his legs are wheels.
iii
Eyes upward
into the abseiling spiders
that clutter the air,
muffle the earth
in an exhilaration of snow.
Air-slicked,
slivered,
low to
the ground,
arrow straight,
pointed,
concealed in speed,
flecked
and silvered,
particle, weight
and eye.
Happiness didn’t intrude on him too much
so instead he took to filling himself with booze,
which zinged his mind, sent him dancing
(after a fashion) home most nights.
He became known for dancing,
which was not to his advantage; it was a style
of dancing that people considered unseemly,
so they left him to himself, to dance himself home.
Made him very angry with everyone, he took to arguing
with himself, but in his isolation, he lost his volume
control, found himself kicked out of the bars onto the streets;
the streets where the traffic passes in an unending blur.
There seemed no reason not to argue with a blur; he did
continually, eventually becoming physical,
but the traffic didn’t stop
Cherry-blossomed with sunlight:
our black branches
above January’s whitened hills.
Let’s gather the berries
of these Fabergé-brilliant wonders
into the bright cans of our eyes;
let’s harvest their sparkle;
drench the old stones
that have long since forgotten to smile.
