Anam Cara

With no thought for the one to whom it comes,

Or how a heart grieves itself and loved ones

With that last glimpse from its fading presence.

Yet it is intimate, the act of death,

To be so chosen, exposed and taken.

Nowhere untouched. But death wants you broken.

The soldiers must wait ages for your last breath.

With all the bright words, you are found out too,

In agony and terror in vaulted air,

Your mind bleached white by a wind from nowhere

That has waited years for one strike at you.

A slanted rain cuts across the black day.

It turns stones crimson where the cross is laid.

 

The Glorious Mysteries

 

THE RESURRECTION

 

Oh, the rush with which the forgotten mind awakens

Under the day a well of dark where colour dwells

Until it learns the art of light and can reveal,

In neglected things, the freshness thought darkens.

With grey mastery distance starts to blur the horror.

Already the days begin to set around the loss.

The after-silence of his death becomes porous

To the gossip of regret that follows failure.

Through the cold, quiet nighttime of the grave

underground,

The earth concentrated on him with complete longing

Until his sleep could recall the dark from beyond

To enfold memory lost in the requiem of mind.

The moon stirs a wave of brightening in the stone.

He rises clothed in the young colours of dawn.

 

THE ASCENSION

 

With waves the ocean soothes the dark stillness of

the shore.

With words the mind would calm the awful, inner quiet.

Offerings to the nothingness on which we trespass.

Our imprint no deeper than breath on a mirror.

Though delighted by the wonder of your return,

To glimpse you is already too much for their eyes.

At your cadence of voice a bird stirs in the heart,

Its wings spread such brightness nothing can hold its form.

You are no longer from here, yet you still linger

In the lightness, wed to the dance you awaken,

As if in drudged-down lives, the song of your new hands

Could raise the soul towards horizons of desire.

You slip through a door of air. Memory comes home,

Bright as a dead tree drawn to blossom by the moon.

 

THE DESCENT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

 

Somewhere in our clay remembers the speed of cold,

Overtaking the surge of colours with grey breath,

And the shudder of fields, as they smother beneath

The white infinity of ice paralysing the world.

How swiftly fear touches this relic-cold in the bone.

After his second going, they hide from the crowd.

Then, like manna from a red wind, a tongue of

flame swirls

Into each mind huddled there in the fear-filled room.

The language caul they lived in falls, leaves them wordless,

Then, a kindling, words they never knew they had come

Alive out of nowhere sprung with awakening

That will not cease until winter sets the heart free.

Out in the open now, voices of new belonging,

Needing no courage beyond the fire of their longing.

 

THE ASSUMPTION

 

Perhaps time is the keeper of distance and loss,

Knowing that we are but able for a little at a time.

And the innocence of fragments is wise with us,

Keeps us from order that is not native to our dust.

Yet, without warning, a life can suddenly chance

On its hidden rhythm, find a flow it never knew.

Where the heart was blind, subtle worlds rise into view;

Where the mind was forced, crippled thought

begins to dance.

As if this day found for her everything she lost.

Her breath infused with harvest she never expected

From the unlived lives she had only touched in dream;

Her mind rests; memory glows in a stairs of twilight.

Her hair kisses the breeze. Her eyes know it is time.

She looks as young as the evening the raven came.

 

THE CORONATION

 

It was a long time ago in another land.

Who can tell how it really was before belief

Came towards you with a hunger that could not see you

Except against white air cleansed of the shadow of earth?

No inkling that you were a free spirit who loved

The danger of seeing the world with an open mind,

How you strove to be faithful to uncertainty

And let nothing unquestioned settle in your heart.

You loved to throw caution to the wind when you danced.

To be outside in the dawn before people were,

Letting the blue tides of your dreaming settle ashore.

The village said you put the whole thing into his head.

In the glow of your silence, the heart grows tranquil.

No one will ever know where you had to travel.

 

DISTANCES

 

The antelope are the only creatures swift enough to catch the distance.

 

—LOUISE ERDRICH

 

 

Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.

 

—E. M. CIORAN

 

 

Because the outer walls of God are glass.

 

—ANNE CARSON

 

 

WORDS

 

For Ethel and Sheila

 

Words may know the way to reach the dark

Where the wild sweetness of a hillside

Is distilled in a hive under grass.

Words may tell how the rhythm of tide

Can soften its salt-voice on the shore

Through music it steals when stone confides.

Words may capture how the ravens soar

In silk black selves far into the blue

To seek the nest of night’s colour hoard.

Words may live under ground out of view

Holding a vanished world etched in scrolls