Anam Cara

And become at once entranced

By this strange window of light,

A white wound in the night,

Its drawbridge down,

And flew in to the blind worship

Of its deadly brightness.

 

BEFORE THE BEGINNING

 

Unknown to us, there are moments

When crevices we cannot see open

For time to come alive with beginning.

As in autumn a field of corn knows

When enough green has been inhaled

From the clay and under the skill

Of an artist breeze becomes gold in a day,

When the ocean still as a mirror

Of a sudden takes a sinister curve

To rise in a mountain of wave

That would swallow a village.

How to a flock of starlings

Scattered, at work on grass,

From somewhere, a signal comes

And suddenly as one, they describe

A geometric shape in the air.

When the audience becomes still

And the soprano lets the silence deepen,

In that slowed holding, the whole aria

Hovers nearer, then alights

On the wings of breath

Poised to soar into song.

These inklings were first prescribed

The morning we met in Westport

And I was left with such sweet time

Wondering if between us something

Was deciding to begin or not.

 

THE BANSHEE’S* GROTTO

 

After a photograph by Fergus Bourke

 

 

The…bean sí is a solitary being…

 

—PATRICIA LYSAGHT

 

I heard her across the river crying; a neighbour was dying.

 

—PADDY O’DONOHUE

 

The tear is the anticipation of the eye’s future.

 

—JOSEPH BRODSKY

 

The messenger comes from that distant place

Beside us where we cannot remember

How unlikely it is that we are here,

Keepers of interiors not our own,

Strangers in whom dawn and twilight are one.

 

When the black door opens, she often appears,

Keeping her distance from the house of grief,

Circling it with her cry until her tears

Have cut a path to the nerve of a name

That soon will stand alone on a headstone.

No one has seen her face or can fathom

Why she comes so far to mourn a stranger.

She is no Rachel weeping for her children,

No Cassandra doomed to remain unheard,

She is the first voice from the other world.

It seems the camera’s eye caught her form

Hunched inside a waterfall in Mweelrea.

Is it there she collects tears of delight

Sure that death is bright, or worn down with grief

Must she drink from her Conamara Lethe?

 

WIND ARTIST

 

For Ellen Wingard

 

Among the kingdom of the winds,

Perhaps, there is one of elegant mind

Who has no need to intrude

On the solitude of single things.

A wind at ease with the depth

Of its own emptiness, who knows

How it was in the beginning,

Before the silence became unbearable

And space rippled to dream things.

A wind who feels how an object strains

To be here, holding its darkness tight

Against the sever of air, ever eager

To enter, and with a swell of light

Dissolve the form in its breathing.

A wind from before memory

Whose patience will see things become

Passionate dust whorled into sighs

Of ghost-song on its wings.

 

ELEMENTAL

 

Is the word the work

Of someone who tills the blue field,

Unearths its dark plenitude

For the tight seed to release its thought

Into the ferment of clay,

Searching to earth the light

And come to voice in a word of grain

That can sing free in the breeze,

Bathe in the yellow well of the sun,

Avoid the attack of the bird,

And endure the red cell of the oven

Until memory leavens in the gift of bread?

 

THE PLEADING

 

All night long, and all through the white day,

The beat of the wind’s bulk against the house,

Pausing only for a breath, and then, again,

The rise and wail of its keening, as if I

Could come out into it, and answer

Its unbearable grief with some sweet name,

From which it could make an antiphon

To calm down its demented legion

Of breezes, or failing that, could I find

And release a granite rock, to open

A duct in the mountain, for it to enter

And search the underworld for itself.

 

THE SECRET OF THERENESS

 

For Martin Downey

 

And the earth fled to the lowest place.*

And the mystery of the breeze,

Arising from nowhere, could be

A return of unrequited memory

Awake at last to a sense of loss,

Stirring up the presences in these fields,

Clutches of thistle roll their purple eyes,

Grasses wave in a trembling whisper,

Profusions of leaf dance slowly

On the low spires of rowan trees;

In fields and walls the granite ones

Never waver from stillness, stones

Who know a life without desire,

Each dwells in its own distance

From night acclaimed by twilight

And day released through dawn.

Utterly focused in their stance,

Stones praise the silence of time.

 

BREAKAGE

 

Life sentence. First night.

Whistles from cages in Hades.

Black dog. He breathes for me.

Nowhere. Dead air.

Months later. All normal.

Then, it hit her.

 

 

Found letters. Too late.

The shock of who she was.

 

 

Labour pains. Relief.

Then, the child. Damaged.

 

INNER CIRCLE

 

For John Moriarty

 

Stranger sometimes than the yellow crotchet

Of glimpses that civilize the dark, or the

Shelter of voices who stall the dead

Silence that longs to return to stone,

Stranger is the heart, a different scripture,

Weighed down by thoughts of gods

Who will never emerge, to recommend

One way above another to anywhere,

Lest they distract from the festival