Anam Cara

Then she began,

a rib curve,

urgent,

calling home

the unknown.

Raid

Night would not let me in,

without sleep, days turned grey

and empty, lying in wait

until the raven comes.

Her wings close my skull

in festered grip, her beak

breaks through the shell,

picks at the yolk of memory,

garbles up the vowels that cried

my childhood out, held my father’s death,

sucks into the crevice of her breath

the secrets I had kept,

makes vacant what is intimate.

Of a swoop, she is into flight,

the beat of feather oars slowly

break the air but leave no trace.

High above intricacies of marsh

to some unknown blackthorn

she ferries her ragged coffin,

doomed to become the grief

she so naively thieved.

Damage: A Conamara Cacophony

These stones in the wild

hold winter inside.

Their bleak quiet

unnerves the varicose bog.

Their rough faces

puncture light.

The wrestle

of aggressive grass

cuts windsong to gibberish.

The pools of bog

have tongues

that can lick

iron to nothing.

Now and then,

a raven

lines the air

with a black antiphon.

Gleninagh

The dark inside us is sistered outside

in night which dislikes the light of the face

and the colours the eye longs to embrace.

Night adores the mountain, wrapped to itself,

a giant heart beating beneath rock and grass

and a mind stilled inside one, sure thought.

Something has broken inside this Spring night,

unconsolably its rain teems unseen

onto Gleninagh Mountain’s listening depth.

Next morning the light is cleansed to behold

the glad milk of thirty streams pulse and spurt

out of unknown pores in the mountain’s hold.

Selves

From where she is

he seems singular,

clear as the silver

longing of the moon

filling the memory

of an empty ruin,

still hidden, despite

the hunger of light

and night’s dark preference

for burnt fragment.

He appears to be

relieved of the seeping

dross of nuance

no one but the stone

can name him now.

She grew somehow

haunted by the continuous

blue of his crevice voice

knew soon that a complete cry

even if he could make it

might leave nothing.

She rages, forgets

dreams of the ancestral

ocean coming

pouring over

the horizon.

Tropism

Tight ground

grips you

hips below clay

legs knotted

into one root,

its toothed eye

bites deep

into the dark

of the buried nest

where thoughts ground.

Hunger is your

only compass.

You must have

locked

onto granite.

The stem of your back

is beautiful,

were it not for

the yellow leaves

of your mind,

flaking.

Outside Memory

Concealed within daylight,

the dead emerge to work

the fields of night.

Their fingers slip

through the gauze of sleep,

sift the loam of dream,

hour after hour

for pictures

of their lost faces.

Their cold tongues

stop the breath of trees,

wet the sides of rock,

eager to root out

relics of voice.

The beat of their feet

drums road and path

with every sound

and rhythm of walk,

begs the ground

to recall their footsteps.

Their white eyes,

moons in miniature,

beseech well and river

to stop awhile

and be their mirror.

Chosen

‘The familiar, precisely because it is familiar,

remains unknown.’

Hegel

I

She has become

a country woman,

arms brawny,

hair mangled

in a greasy cap,

features winnowed,

eyes accustomed,

gestures gapped.

She can now bring

the hazel stick down

raw over warm

animals’ backs,

empty cows’ dugs

into galvanized buckets,

wheaten the yard corner

for gossipy hens.

II

Impaled in fright,

she has keened

the tender ground

of paddocked night,

learned to become

immune within

when the flailing begins

in search of relief

then falls aside

lost in sleep.

III

In the sunday church

the same pale priest

winds dead talk

in dark wreathes

around their minds.

The spotless host

baked by some nun

is fit for altar

not for table,

bread of the white life.

Nor does the wine body

any languid remembrance

of swelling sun,

bottled for the altar

in a stone abbey

by an enclosed order.

Later, special offers

written on the windows

of the local store,

and just inside the door

milk-skinned models

leer in coy surprise

from covers of tabloids.

IV

Under the frame

of their stubborn farm

a stream has catacombed,

won echo-room

to hear its pilgrim mind

decipher the intention

of freed fossiled stone,

mingle the memory

of tendril and bone,

touch the turbulence

of the unknown,

unchosen clay,

in the forbidden region,

where light and form

have nothing to say.

She is often drawn

along its rumble line

to the spring well

where its face

appears to form.

She likes to sit,

watch the cattle come,

one by one;

each huge head

for a while

conceals the well,

gleans its fill,

will gaze with dark

moon eyes ever

deeper there,

as if astonished

at the water veil.

Some extend her

that oracled stare

of animal to human;

then turn around again

to graze the ground.

V

Since what is

gradual becomes less

and less visible,

she noticed most

the early hurt.

She came first

graceful, young

fell in soon

with farmwork.

Love only made her

more lonely still,

for herself and for him,

his breath on her skin,

his surge filling her

to empty himself

of the unease

that love kindled

between them.

Then, one day

within her

the raw beat

relented.

Suddenly

she saw herself

forever marooned

between land and man.