Anam Cara

Under sands where streets lay and youth grew.

When the red vapour breathes through the soul

And pain closes down the ease of the day

Words stagger back to silence and fold.

 

WINGS

 

For Josie

 

Whenever a goose was killed,

My mother got the two wings.

They were placed on the rack

Over the black Stanley range

And taken down to sweep

Around the grate and the floor.

Local women said: no matter

How you sprinkled it, every time

You’d sweep a concrete floor,

You’d get more off it.

As if, deep down,

There was only dust.

Often during sweeping,

A ray of light

Through the window

Would reveal

How empty air

Could hold a wall

Of drunken dust.

Instead of being folded around

Each side of a living body,

Embracing the warmth

And urgency of a beating heart,

The wings are broken objects now,

Rubbed and rubbed, edge down

Into an insatiable floor,

Smothered and thinned,

Until they become ghost feathers

Around a cusp of bone

Polished by motherly hand.

Never again to be disturbed

Every year by the call

Of the wild geese overhead,

Reminding them of the sky,

Urging them to raise the life

They embrace, to climb the breeze

Beyond the farm, towards horizons

That veil the green surge of the ocean.

 

THE TRANSPARENT BORDER

 

There is a strange edge to the wind today,

Some irritation with the patient strain

Of trees, the ‘willing to bend with anything’

Trick of the rushes, the shoals of shadow

Perplexing the lake and all the silent

Aloofness of the stones, something

Very old, perhaps, resentment towards

These bog fields, each rooted in its dark

Continuum and known to people by name

And season, from which many stones

Have been claimed to make houses

Where they grow warm with human echoes,

And the lake, to which the mountains come

To mirror themselves, where twilights linger

Before night sends everything to rest;

A resentment at the way they all somehow

Slipped across the transparent border

From idea into individual thing,

Glistening with name, colour and form

At the beginning, when the wind would have

Felt breath was where presence lived.

 

THE ANGEL OF THE BOG

 

For Lelia

 

The angel of the bog mourns in the wind

That loiters all over these black meadows.

Remembers how it chose branches to strum

From the orchestra of trees that stood here;

How at twilight a chorus of birds came

To silence in nests of darkening air.

Raindrops filter through leaves, silver the air,

Wash off the film of dust to release nets

Of fragrance on which the wind can sweeten

Before expiring among the debris

That brightens each year with fallen colour

Before the weight of winter seals the ground.

The dark eyes of the angel of the bog

Never open now when dawn comes to dress

The famished grass with splendid veils of red,

Amber, white, as if its soul were urgent

And young with possibility and dreams

That a vanished life might become visible.

 

PLACENTA

 

For Máire Bheag

 

 

It grew between you

 

Naturally.

 

This wise wall

 

That took everything

 

From you

 

He needed.

 

 

 

Grew varicose,

 

To carry through

 

The seepage of calcium.

 

Holding rhythm,

 

Offering time,

 

To structure and settle

 

The white scribble

 

Until it finds

 

The stillness

 

And strength

 

Of bone.

 

 

 

Fed the beat

 

Of your pulse

 

Through the dark,

 

A first music,

 

To steady the quiver

 

That would become

 

His heart.

 

 

 

Sieved from the stream

 

Of your breathing,

 

The breath of trees,

 

Fragrance of flowers,

 

The heavy scent of woman,

 

Chorus of seas,

 

Ripples of the ancestral,

 

And the strange taste

 

Of a shadow-father,

 

When you kissed.

 

 

 

Feels towards the end

 

The temper of flow change

 

And absorbs the white stream

 

To urge the child free.

 

 

 

On your own,

 

Now,

 

Growing away

 

From each other.

 

Nothing

 

Between you

 

But the distance

 

That will remain

 

Alive

 

With invisible tissue.

 

MOUNTAIN-LOOKING

 

For the Burren Action Group

who saved Mullach Mór

 

The mountain waits for no one

But rises on its own to overlook

The blind spread of fields and

The local pride of trees adept

At the art of singular ascent.

The lakes which stay in place,

Somehow held up by the threaded

Resolve of the bog that rusts the water

Until it takes dark for depth.

The grey certainty of the stones,

Stained yellow with moss and lichen,

Who serve as sentinels among the bushes,

Alert for the whisper of the ice

That will return to retrieve them

In white nests from the loose air.

And the earth-orphans

In their strong homes

That light up at night

On sealed ground

Where they shelter from

The seamless totality of the dark

Claiming all the spaces of separation.

Watched by animals,

They emerge at daytime;

No surface here

Could wear frowns

Like these faces.

Their limbs and eyes

Blurred with desire,

They climb up sometimes

Hoping, maybe,

To see what the summit sees.

 

SEDUCED?

 

In the empty carton

Inside the door of the attic,

Five blue crystals wait

To entice the visitors

Who will come in the dark,

Breath seduced

By the distant scent

Of such blue delight.

Frost and hunger

Will bring them in

To the labyrinth

Of breathing spaces

That run through

The stone walls.

They will never see

How beautiful

The walls are on

The other side, the warm

Surfaces of soft peach

That shelter the joy

Of love, music and thought,

With windows toward

Mountains adored by light.