Shaft of sunlight,
reflection off a million specks
of dust,
feeding his face with lines and grace
– soft light paints old faces
the friendliness of sweet Autumn apples –.
Hands held down to his grand-daughter,
she looking up into his face;
the delicacy of the moment
as Vermeer would have caught it
in the light that spills down
from a hole in the clouds.
There is just a suggestion of mountainous terrain across the bay;
when, in the haze, they disappear so do I;
but a starling on the apex of the gable continually shifting the dial
along the short-wave is holding me present.
Sunlight is a strange thing. It lies, dead body on the patio;
takes everyone, everything down with it;
but it’s then the earth transmits most readily
what the sun is communicating.
Now the sun is counting my bones, registering their composition,
colour and structure; I, stretched out on a flag,
am almost reduced to clay,
the listening layer of soil.
o we’d have a coffee, maybe two, then off
into town by the side streets, looking for
red-brick houses with lilac doors and yellow
window frames. Drop into the IFI, sit over
another coffee, browsing the catalogue with half interest,
the steady drift of film-goers and idlers with more.
On down Dame Street to College Green,
enjoying our navigation of ever-shifting crowds,
the dexterous manoeuvrability of ourselves.
In Hodges Figgis we’d scan the poetry
shelves and the art books, those names and titles
settling in our heads like we were travelling the
world: Heaney, Mahon, Carver, Balthus,
Kahlo, Lorca, Basho, Holub ‒ dabs of fresh paint
and print to keep us informed for a month or two ‒
before returning to Grafton Street to knit crooked stitches
through the crowds, stop a few minutes to hear a busker
play a saw or slide guitar then around to Tower Records
to be tempted by some new ECM arrival in the jazz section.
George’s, Aungier, Wexford, Camden, Richmond Streets;
the diminishing scale of a city’s architecture, and
the backwards walk down the telescope to the landscape
of our normal lives. Crossing the border at the canal, with
its familiar vista down Rathmines Road to the mountains
beyond; we, like fish, breathing easier in our own habitat,
saw our hurdles flattened, but, perhaps, never recognized
the days of our lives?
That beautiful odyssey: Saturdays, mid-morning to mid-afternoon;
or maybe it was just one Saturday,
or, maybe, it wasn’t at all.
Arms thrown open;
friendship it seems;
doubt it.
Too close to that face,
the full of your eyes:
a prison.
My self-portrait is a busy place;
a totem pole of chancers.
Face beneath face,
each advertising its schtick.
It’s late,
but still I’ll start again;
I must start again.
Gentians,
May’s bright eyes
were yours
but now those buds
have closed,
never to open.
Stripped of their tongues,
the mourners
file past;
the quenching
of your beauty
like their Summer repealed.
My new collection, The Sound of Water Searching, will be launched by poet, playwright Vincent Woods at 8.30pm, Friday, March 25th in Drop Dead Twice on Francis Street. The launching will be followed by The Upstairs Sessions, a monthly night of performances of all kinds which never fails to entertain.
I have, of course, notified Dublin Airport that there will be a spike in air traffic and Ryanair have laid on extra flights. I expect the ports will also experience difficulties, but it is generally understood that the launching is an event of exceptional importance both nationally and internationally. So, I recommend you get there early. 😉
It is in his nature to shoot songbirds out of the sky,
to enjoy that moment
when a bird’s flight becomes sheer fall by his hand.
It is in his nature to take pleasure in another’s pain;
he can contemplate with satisfaction the damage
he might wreak with a broken bottle.
It is in his nature to be power-hungry,
to gain a position in which to indulge his pleasures;
relentlessness is part of his violence.
Where the high soprano sings notes so pure
they might crystallise and glint in the sunlight,
these men are deaf as steel.
If only those notes had invaded their hearts,
that steel might now be ringing with harmonies
beautiful enough to liberate souls.
A rewrite from last year.
Her Fingers, Piano and Light.
Her fingers on the piano keys:
nails brighter, redder than rose-hips.
A net of cigarette smoke hanging, filled
with the two of us and afternoon sunlight.
Room receiving the notes like a canyon;
momentary silences with flaring incandesence
between fingertips, and piano notes again
spill out like sequins.
Brass and silver, mahogany, ashtrays and
antimacassars,
Liszt like a gold tooth;
green glints of sunlight from bevelled glass;
she smiles; the music twirls a cane
with that jangly old piano aplomb,
fills the room till the walls fall away, and she
with her deforming contours of smoke dissipates.
I write to hold on,
but I may as well be catching steam.
Lifted off the sky,
wet strand,
on Atlantic gales,
flittered sunlight,
gulls banking
over drumlins
to a moon-
crescent bay,
to be,
closed hands,
hidden
on a cockle shore
It's been a long time coming and, needless to say, I think it's the literary event of the year. The Sound of Water Searching is now available from Lapwing Publications. Available in soft cover only, it costs £10/€12 plus postage. For purchasing information email https://sites.google.com/a/lapwingpublications.com/lapwing-store/to-buy-a-lapwing-title For information on Lapwing Publications email lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com You can contact me at mmodros@gmail.com
The Sound of Water Searching
From personal poems that draw on "the emptied out treasure-chests of childhood" to reflections on the work of Elaine Leigh, John Minihan, Mick O'Dea and others, Michael O'Dea is interested in the ways that memory, experience, and meditation inform the life of the poet. The poems gathered in The Sound of Water Searching give voice to his ceaseless commitment to the artistic process: a "beautiful odyssey" that takes us from Dublin to Galicia and beyond.
Philip Coleman (Trinity College Dublin)
No
not you there
but
being
like
a thought there
your eyes present
but
bodily
not substantial
not
like flesh
but
beauty your
yes
incontrovertibly
child
staring standing
Nightfall; a light at sea,
a hand in a net.
Memory:
a beach in Connemara
the sound of which
that tide keeps playing
its faint knowledge
of pleasure, a shooting star
of night ending with
things that could have been said,
that burnt a hole
black as time,
that repeat
the whole life long.
