Anam Cara

matted with the cockroach phrases

of other voices that

crawled in to hurt.

He stops

when he sees

the white scroll

and backs off

from its silence.

Exiled Clay

I am not sure you

live anywhere, no

cord of clay holds

you moored.

The air is brittle

and cannot settle

near your attention.

Your cell has

no cloister, for

abandon anoints you.

To what place

belongs the red bush

of your blood?

Who could travel

your mountains of dream,

glimpse gazelles

limp towards dawn,

see flowers

thirst through earth

for dew,

and hear at least

the sound

of swan’s wings

bless the dark?

Instead of Kissing the Cross …

The Good Friday altar is bleak

three crosses, rough with nails,

we are meant to think

of someone in pain, approach

a cross, each step a prayer,

and take a nail to lighten

the burden. I think of you,

the torture of the last year,

the trembling, no sleep, the change

in life turning your soul into

a refugee, with tears I take

the nail of pain away and promise

my shoulder beneath your cross.

Tonight for the first time

you are able to talk.

I find that it is I

who helped you

to that bleak place,

where no certainty

can ever settle.

Anything Can Come

I

Oh

the white utopia

of her mind.

Each thought is worked

until it is hard and pale.

It takes years of prayer.

Even the smear marks

of childhood erase.

But

the intentions of the rain

are not innocent, it falls

and falls upon her sleep

to soften the pavements.

Eventually

a horse, concepted

clear and royal,

brooms the cloister

with a tail of ravens.

Flint beaks spark

voices in the stone:

II

“Receive the night

from whom you come,

who longs to enfold you

since the womb.

No.

Do not look back.

For there is a man

with long palms about

to place for you

a black moon

on each shoulder.

Your face exposes you.

How you dream

of its features receding

to a nondescript

plate of white.

Unkindly, light leaves

but the memory

flicker of being

happy once

with your doll

and your daddy

in the church

until a burly,

shorthorn bull

got in a sidedoor

and up the aisle,

no one dared

to stop him,

delicately lowing,

he placed

his wild head

all over

the tabernacle.”

Young Mind

A thurible swings

longingly

against the will

of the wind

keeping time

with the red moons

of charcoal

that burn fragrance

from sands

of incense.

Broken Moon

The moon

came down

into the cellar.

Out of its silver well,

their hind legs

leaving splashes,

come the rats.

Expectation

Too long stranded in the air, the land loves

the innocence of the incoming sea,

perfectly she ascends to fill its loss

of ground in a swell of blue energy.

Land lies under life and cannot come up

or close against the rain of sound and touch,

has to absorb night and day, leaves and bone,

take them below to where the air stores time.

In coils of wave, winding in dance, the sea

is too fluent to feel its own silence,

only for the sure gaze and grip of shore

it would not know itself to be the sea.

Held for a while, the sea is satisfied,

then she pulls her silk of water away

into the independence of blue;

shawls of weed fall off, show how tide chews rock.

Nothingness:

The Secret of the Cross

This land would like to fold

its surface into peaks,

let no feet touch it.

The heavy sun leans

on black bedouin tents

that cover the nomad’s mind.

Here light has no mercy,

shadows are wounds

that blacken the sand.

Olive trees stand up,

gargoyles fed on

distant, buried moisture.

The mountains of Moab

severe and white, salt

the gaze and turn it back.

Even the wind is red

when it comes, it swarms

with insidious sands.

No blue door opens in to

the infinite, in this land

the eyes of Jesus saw

nothing.

Self-Distance

Near me

scents of bath oil

veiled by her dress.

Near me

in a language I cannot receive

a lone tree stirs

to nurse the air.

Near me

the dark crouched

in you leaks to

soot the light.

Near me

estranged from his bones in Fanore

the silence of my father

hears me.

Near me

the frustration, the invisible

sculptures, thoughts make

on unmirrored air.

Around me

black streams

through the silence

of white bone.

Somewhere inside

the wings of the heart

make their own skies.

In me

a tenderness I find

hard to allow.

Ich wünsche mir

I wish for

swiftness,

limb to light

to be

gone beyond

the white, bleached

field,

ploughed

by the lone crow’s

beak.

Cottage

I sit, alert

behind the small window

of my mind and watch

the days pass,

strangers,

who have no reason

to look in.

The Voyage of Gentians

for the Burren Action Group

in their struggle to save beautiful Mulach Mór

Through this fester of bony earth, trying

to avoid on their way the snares of root

that trap whatever leaves the dark, what do

these tribes of blue gentian come up here for?

Is it enough for them to climb onto

this April day above in Caherbeanna

into light confused with yellow and grey

and whorled by the song of a cuckoo?

Betrayed by Light

The first breath of morning breaks the dark enough

to let the sky out of night, it gathers up

the trust of trees that leaned with such relief