Anam Cara

Of vivid presence, where journeys are not

Stretched over distance, and time

Is beyond the fatality of before and

After, and elsewhere and otherwise

Do not intrude on day or night.

 

FLUENT

 

I would love to live

Like a river flows,

Carried by the surprise

Of its own unfolding.

 

THE STILLNESS ABOVE IS LISTENING

 

Rooted in the quiet earth beneath

Which enjoys the quiver as harebells

Relinquish perfect scoops of breeze

Absorbs the syllables when rain lowers

Its silver chorus to coalesce

With granite rocks terse with thirst

And tight with the force of unfreed voice

Feels the moon on its fields brightening

The length of night out into the nowhere

That would love a name like Conamara

The mountain remains a temple of listening

Over years its contours concede to the lonesome

Voices brittle with the threat of what is gathering

Towards their definite houses below

Harvesting the fragments of sound

Into its weight of stillness.

 

MOUNTAIN CHRISTENING

 

For Nöel Hanlon

 

 

Poor wounded name! my bosom, as a bed shall lodge thee…

 

—SHAKESPEARE

 

After a hard climb

Through a dry river-bed,

Its scoured stones glistening

Like a white chain to the horizon,

Descending between its links

The long concerto of a stream

Where the listening mountains incline,

Rising against the steep fall of soft bog,

Searching for our grip

In the shimmer of scree.

At last on the summit

Of the Beanna Beola,

Overlooking three valleys,

Delighted to be so high

Above the lives where we dwell,

Together for a while

From other sides of the world,

Sensing each other,

Strangely close,

Suddenly, your voice

Calling out my name.

I call yours.

The echoes take us

To the heart of the mountains.

When the silence closes,

You say: Now that they

Have called our names back

The mountains can

Never forget us.

 

THE NIGHT UNDERNEATH

 

Night carries blame for dream and

The other worlds, you become

Mother opening the door to

Walk inside the colour blue

Where animals wear haloes.

Frescoes that evaporate

Into the grey wall of dawn.

You waken to continue on.

Shake yourself free from the night,

Continue with yesterday’s life.

Under the day’s white surface

All the scripture has withered.

No word, no sound to be heard

In the long wind that reaps dust

From all the harvest of voice.

And the mind behind it all

Has dried up, left nothing but

Its ghost imprint active still

Listening to your footsteps fall,

Their music of red shadows,

Knowing that sooner or later

Some distant light will flicker,

Your blind feet will stumble on

That frail place to send your weight

Through the depth of paper earth.

 

DECORUM

 

In the winter night

By the lake edge

A stern breeze makes

The young novices

Of reed bend

Low and bow

To the mystery

Of a shadow-mountain,

Gathered the moment

The cloud freed the moon.

 

IMAGINED ORIGINS

 

For M.

 

Nothing between us, so near

I hear your skin whisper

What you could never tell

Of the longing that called us.

How through the branches

On to the clay beneath the oak,

A lace of light came down

To wait and watch each day,

And the secrecy of the breeze,

Dying down over the shiver

In the earth, hovering there

To blend its voice to breath,

How, even then, the rain

Through the brow of grasses

Could foreshadow tears

And the trickle of water change,

Or the fright of crows from trees

At dusk into the empty paleness,

This rush of black words today

Searching for you on the white page.

 

ENCOUNTERS

 

THE ROSARY SONNETS

 

For Noel Dermot O’Donoghue

 

and in memory of Pete and Paddy O’Donohue

 

 

 

 

 

—JN 1:14.

 

 

Love, like fire, can only reveal its brightness

 

On the failure and beauty of burnt wood.

 

—PHILIPPE JACCOTTET

 

 

To stand in the shadow

 

of the scar up in the air.

 

—PAUL CELAN

 

 

AN PAIDRÍN

 

I gcuimhne ar Cyril Ó Céirín

Ar nós cheoil na farraige

Tagtha sa bhfoscadh

Ar an teallach

Ag brionglóidí uirthi féin,

An bhrionglóid chéanna

Ó i bhfad i gcéin

Ag snámh go séimh

Idir thrá agus tuile

Na Sé do bheatha, a Mhuire.

 

THE ROSARY

 

As though the music of the ocean

Had come to shelter

On the home hearth

Dreaming of itself

In the selfsame dream

From a far distant region

In buoyant ease

Between the fill and fall

Of waves of Hail Marys.

 

The Joyful Mysteries

 

THE ANNUNCIATION

 

Cast from afar before the stones were born

And rain had rinsed the darkness for colour,

The words have waited for the hunger in her

To become the silence where they could form.

The day’s last light frames her by the window,

A young woman with distance in her gaze,

She could never imagine the surprise

That is hovering over her life now.

The sentence awakens like a raven,

Fluttering and dark, opening her heart

To nest the voice that first whispered the earth

From dream into wind, stone, sky and ocean.

She offers to mother the shadow’s child;

Her untouched life becoming wild inside.

 

THE VISITATION

 

In the morning it takes the mind a while

To find the world again, lost after dream

Has taken the heart to the underworld

To play with the shades of lives not chosen.

She awakens a stranger in her own life,

Her breath loud in the room full of listening.