Anam Cara

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

77-85 Fulham Palace Road

London, W6 8JB, UK

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

10 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

John O’Donohue

 

Conamara Blues

 

Poems

 

IN MEMORY OF MY AUNT,

Mary O’Donohue

(1896–1923)

of Caherbeanna, who died

in a tragic road accident shortly

after her emigration to America

Contents

 

Approachings

 

Thought-Work

First Words

Nest

Black Music in Conamara

The Wound at the Side of the House

Before the Beginning

The Banshee’s Grotto

Wind Artist

Elemental

The Pleading

The Secret of Thereness

Breakage

Inner Circle

Fluent

The Stillness Above is Listening

Mountain Christening

The Night Underneath

Decorum

Imagined Origins

Encounters:

The Rosary Sonnets

 

An Paidrín

The Rosary

The Joyful Mysteries

 

The Annunciation

The Visitation

The Nativity

The Presentation in the Temple

The Finding in the Temple

The Sorrowful Mysteries

 

The Agony in the Garden

The Scourging at the Pillar

The Crowning with Thorns

The Carrying of the Cross

The Crucifixion

The Glorious Mysteries

 

The Resurrection

The Ascension

The Descent of the Holy Spirit

The Assumption

The Coronation

Distances

 

Words

Wings

The Transparent Border

The Angel of the Bog

Placenta

Mountain-Looking

Seduced?

At the Edge

Up the Mountain

Prisons of Voice

The Ocean Wind

Outside a Cottage

Breakage

Double Exposure

Elemental

The Night

Anchor

A Burren Prayer

Notes

Index of First Lines

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by John O’Donohue

Copyright

About the Publisher

APPROACHINGS

 

I want to watch watching arrive.

 

I want to watch arrivances.

 

—HÉLÉNE CIXOUS

 

 

I think back gladly on the future.

 

—HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBENGER

 

 

Think of things that disappear.

 

Think of what you love best,

 

What brings tears to your eyes.

 

Something that said adios to you

 

Before you knew what it meant

 

Or how long it was for.

 

—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

 

 

THOUGHT-WORK

 

In memory of Joe Pilkington

 

Off course from the frail music sought by words

And the path that always claims the journey,

In the pursuit of a more oblique rhythm,

Creating mostly its own geography,

The mind is an old crow

Who knows only to gather dead twigs,

Then take them back to the vacancy

Between the branches of the parent tree

And entwine them around the emptiness

With silence and unfailing patience

Until what was fallen, withered and lost

Is now set to fill with dreams as a nest.

 

FIRST WORDS

 

For Shane O’Donohue

 

Parents know not what they do

When they coax those first words

Out of you, start a trickle

Of saying that will not cease.

Long after they no longer hear

Your talk, the words they started

Continue to call out for someone

To come near enough to hear

The cadence of what has happened

Deep in the inevitable growing

Heavy and weary of heart

Under the layer of days

Where memory works cold fusions,

As if your voice could carry you

Out of the stillness to the warmth

Of someone who would linger with you

To search the frozen parts for tears

Until a forgotten line fires

Down through the word-hoard

To where your first silence was

Broken, and your rhythm born.

 

NEST

 

For J.

 

I awaken

To find your head

Loaded with sleep,

Branching my chest.

Feel the streams

Of your breathing

Dream through my heart.

From the new day,

Light glimpses

The nape of your neck.

Tender is the weight

Of your sleeping thought

And all the worlds

That will come back

When you raise your head

And look.

 

BLACK MUSIC IN CONAMARA

 

For John Barry

 

To travel through the trough

Of this Sunday afternoon,

As mist thickens into a screen

All over Conamara,

Holding the mountains back

From the clarity their stern solitude

Strives after, releasing the spring

Lustre of the long grass, ever further

Into a fervence of indigo, so much

So that the granite rocks strewn about

Seem eventually abstract, afterthoughts

To something that took place before them.

 

Take the silver bucket

Full of coarse turf cut from under here;

Light its brown shape in the grate

Until it blooms into a red well.

Put on a disc of smooth steel

That slowly builds, yields up a pulse

Of jazz from Roland Kirk,

Who never was here, but somehow

Played a live concert once, so full

Of the withheld litany

Of this shy, Conamara day.

The saxaphone catches onto

Some riff of murmur,

Deep beneath the roots of the mountains,

Where granite relents, giving way

In tears, to the blanket poultice of the bog.

 

THE WOUND AT THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE

 

For Pat O’ Brien

 

The glistening, neon dome

Turned the night bathroom,

With its window open,

Into an addictive sanctuary

Which had drawn in

The masses of the night.

Thousands of demented ephemerae,

Needle specks of shivering flies,

Moths and myriad winged things

Congregate around its merciless,

Unrelenting light.

 

Having waited all day for the daylight

And its vestal colours to leave,

They arose from the bog,

Navigating rushes, grasses and briars.

Rising into the wonder

Of this night, with its moon

Casting mint light from behind

The mountains of Conamara.

 

On the adventure

Of their few hours of life here,

They had the misfortune

To pass by on this side of the house