Anam Cara

While you sleep,

They will feast

In the dark,

Lick and chew

Each minuscule fibre

Of the forbidden food,

Replace the blue

With emptiness.

By the time

Thirst takes them,

Desperately,

Down to the lake

It will already

Be too late.

 

AT THE EDGE

 

Sometimes, behind the lines

Of words giving voice to the blue wind

That blows across the amber fields

Of your years, whispering the hungers

Your dignity conceals, and the caves

Of loss opening along shores forgotten

By the ocean, you almost hear the depth

Of white silence, rising to deny everything.

 

UP THE MOUNTAIN

 

Was it a choice once,

From within such trembling,

To make a desperate lunge out of here,

Push the fields up into the air,

And make a summit high

Above neighbouring ground offering itself

To host the annual desire of flowers

Emerging like debutantes amidst grass?

Unwilling to linger further under stones,

Endure aimless animal hunger,

And the anger of the trees

Always departing in two directions.

Today the mountain is clear.

It won’t suffer the rain.

The deluge of tears from a sky

Barking in thunder,

But sends the white rivers down

With desperate music

Into the fields of quiet.

 

PRISONS OF VOICE

 

Don’t ask me to walk here

These mountains come too near

Something distance never healed.

In this light, blue and high,

They pretend to be horizons

Claiming the affections of the eye.

But in their concealed cloister

They hold each voice captive

To tune dead stone with narrative.

 

THE OCEAN WIND

 

Through its mouth at Gleann Corráin, the rising

Ocean can see into Fermoyle valley

That never moves from the absence opened

By the cut of its glacier parent.

With wind the ocean bends each lone blackthorn

To a dark sickle facing the mountain.

The wind would like to breathe its crystal breath

Into the mind of the mountain’s darkness

And riddle the certainty of its stone;

It lashes the cliffs with doubt, its sand lips

Deepen the question each crevice opens

And sow hoards of fern seed in the scailps.*

There is no satisfaction for the wind.

To blow through doors and windows of ruins

Only reminds it how empty it is.

Above Caherbeanna’s ruined village

The wind waits all year for the Garraí Clé

To fill with its tribe of golden corn.

Weary from the ghost geometry of the fog

And heaping itself blindly against walls,

The wind unfolds its heart in yellow dance;

Only now in circles, spirals and waves

Of corn can the wind see itself, swift

As the glance of moonlight on breaking tide.

 

OUTSIDE A COTTAGE

 

They allow themselves to be strangers.

Here is somewhere else for them;

They hunt for images to take back

To perfectly ordered cupboards

In Germany or the States,

Proud to have captured

Something authentic of the place.

When the bus drops them,

The cameras come out

To snap the cottage ruin,

Rimmed against the black desert

Of bog and overgrown mountains

With the bones out through them.

They shoot the ruin, not sensing

How the image is a relic,

Imprinted with the presence

Of the ones who laboured here,

The stones warm with breath,

From the time a tourist was a wonder.

Will these ever know how it was,

To live here and know nowhere else,

To wake up inside this house once,

And come out at dawn to discover

Gifts left at the door in the night,

A shivering lake between flowering granite

And this line of new, blue mountains?

 

BREAKAGE

 

Has to. Crack. Wet street.

Her first car stops.

His children’s eyes.

Can’t meet his. Old folks’ home.

Said why. Wrote name with care: Susan.

Then did it.

No sleep. The voices own you.

They take you with them.

If she knew, she’d go. But she doesn’t.

Happy.

 

DOUBLE EXPOSURE

 

Sometimes you see us

Run into each other in a place

Where we cannot simply pass,

Say at a party, and you overhear

Our breath quiveringly collect

To shape a voice sure enough

To play out some pleasantry;

Something humorous is preferable,

It covers perfectly and shows

That everything is as it should be.

As smoothly as possible

We allow ourselves to be waylaid

By some other conversation and escape.

Though we move around the room,

We always know where we stand,

Still strangely bound to each other

In this intermittent dance

Between the music, each careful

To hold up the other side of all

We were to each other before

It stopped, and let nothing slip

From the invisible ruin

We carry between us.

 

ELEMENTAL

 

Is the word the work

Of some elder who quarries

The green mountain

For the hard deposit,

Refines it under black dust

That a bellows blows red,

Hammers it to a wafer

On the white anvil

Until it can carry its own loss,

The anger of the withering fire,

The unstruck echo of the mountain,

Yet succumb to breath

Like pollen to the breeze?

 

THE NIGHT

 

February 1, 1994

 

Nothing can make the night stay outside,

It pours in everywhere, smothers my room

With black air prepared in some unseen cave,

Tightens around my skull the root silence

Of that room in rock; nothing broke the dark

Except the tick of raindrops from above;

Centuries seeping through the limestone

To point a cold finger of stalactite

At emptiness never softened by breath;

Where the sore of absence was never felt