Anam Cara

Your saffron scarf,

filled with wind,

rises over your head

like a halo,

then swings to catch

the back of your neck

like a sickle.

The next instant

the dark returns

this sweep of rotting land,

shrunken and vacant.

Listen,

you can almost hear

the hunger falling

back into itself.

This is no place

to be.

With the sun

withdrawn,

the bog wants to sink,

break

the anchor of rock

that holds it up.

We are left.

There is no one

who knows us.

In our monotone

we beg the bound stone

for our first echo.

From Echoes of Memory

In a certain way, this landscape belongs to no one, but primarily to itself. Landscape is the firstborn of creation. It was here for hundreds of millions of years before ever a plant or an animal arrived here. It was also here, obviously, before the human face ever emerged on earth. It must have seemed very strange to the ancient eye of landscape when we arrived here. Landscape has a huge, pre-human memory. It precedes everything that we know. I often think that you could talk almost of a “clay-ography”: the whole biography of the earth. Everything depends of course on whether you think landscape is dead matter or whether you think it is a living presence.

I think there is life in these rocks and in these great mountains around about us, and because there is life, there is memory. The more you live among mountains like this, the more aware you become of the cadences of the place and the subtlety of the place, its presence and personality. When you look out from here this morning, you see at the front of Máméan the beginning of the Twelve Bens. The fog is halfway down the mountain, and there is another half of the mountain concealed inside that fog that the eye cannot see. With the mind you cannot penetrate that blanket of cover but with the imagination you can sense the presence that is actually there that you cannot see with the eye. And all the time, with the light and the cloud and the rain and the mist, a whole kind of narrative of presence is unfolding, hiding itself, emerging. Not alone that, one of the frightening things about Connemara for a lot of people is how lunar and how bare it actually seems. One must not forget of course that it is mainly bog, and bog is the afterlife of a forest, of all the trees that were here. So even though we are looking down now on major emptiness and bare granite mountains, there was a time when this place was completely clustered and covered with forests and trees. There is a poem that I wrote a while ago trying to reimagine that, called “The Angel of the Bog”:

The Angel of the Bog

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 color

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.

From Conamara Blues

MEMORY

If the human eye had been able to look out over this landscape maybe ten thousand years ago or more, all it would have seen would have been gray, dead black ice everywhere and everything covered completely. It must have been an incredibly frightening and suffocating experience for the land that all its color was overtaken gradually with the surge of the gray breath of the cold, and then the snow, and then the ice freezing down on top of it. To be suffocated under hundreds of feet of this pack ice and to have lived that way for thousands of years must have been an incredible experience for the landscape. You can imagine when the first trickles of water began to loosen and the glaciers began to move, and the landscape became freed of this whole darkness on top of it, the first time that the sun touched it, and seeds maybe hidden for thousands of years began to awaken in the earth—that must have been an incredible emergence for the landscape. So the landscape has the memory of the time of ice that the human knows nothing about; except, I believe that we are made out of clay, that in some sense that memory is within our clay as well. Maybe that is the reason that fear can get to us so quickly, that maybe what fear does is awaken this relic cold in the bone again.