SHADOW PLAY
Through solid weeks
of plague and rage, the earth
a drowning weather-dome,
my private liberty, at home,
has been to rest, mid-
morning, squinting,
as the swallows dance
above me, and beyond –
their shadow-play made whispery
by the bog-reflecting gelatine
of Shannon-water waves,
pushing, slow, and placid
as a dream. Far
from here, the fires scream
inside the mind of redwood trees,
an ashen sigh of sound.
I scan the skyline peaceably,
a grey-
winged, rainy-eyed
dishevelment of cloud,
and count the beeches jutting out
to snare the floating sun.
Stare too long, the colours run.
I lose the plot, and wallow
as loneliness begins –
my sin an outer circumstance
festering within.
O distant reader, skeptic,
take me intimately in:
my meagre, waiting wonder,
my belly-
aching thunder,
as if distilled
(and un-?)poetic anger
were another shade of hunger,
or remorse.
The voice I speak
was built on force.
But ghosting memories
converse
with buried gentleness.
Before the nurses
flurried round, her fingers
fretted softly under sheets:
she fluttered on
in quietness and chitter-talk
to stem all worrying,
then slipped below
to sleep, and final things.
The stone of hers I keep
is lavender, and fleet,
the falling weight
(I adumbrate)
of a wren’s heartbeat
or breathing seed:
a whisper that takes flower
wherever there’s a need,
like the spring-
returning showers
as I stooped to kiss her cheek.
.
.
BLOSS
In hidden Leitrim, where I graze
on simple joy and daily dread,
I pen unlikely letters
to the still returning, deadened ground
that follows me around my new homeplace – my home,
where moving rivers hold the sky in view
(a bowl of dashing weather blues,
awash with feathered stalks of light)
through every furling season of the noon,
or hurly-burly, inky-black, by night. A regular
at self-articulating chat, a mumble-corner
alley-scat, I might in passing
arch my boyish elbows on the rail
and preen my ears as water creaks, the rushes flurry
with a whisper at my back. I lack no pleasure then,
can love as mine the rich un-stillness passing by:
this lonely leisure-life, inland, in reach
of risen breezes, green and free, will carry me!
One smoulder-day, I fled the groaning music
in my brain, to roam instead
the sloping hillock lanes,
long tunnels whistle-lit by wrens,
past alder-shadowed meadows tossing
up before me as I came
two dozen swallows, like a singing seed.
What stopped me, though, (and why I write)
grew thick and shiningly
beside the stream,
a ball of loosened, dropping string:
a badger, disemboweled.
The mouth hung open,
an emptied out, disfigured grin,
neither animal
nor entirely inhuman: mere
and matted matter, growing thin.
I felt a seasoned brightness closing in
across the sedge. The light
of day had edges to it – the same
as when, in sudden sun,
your daughter, shook and grey
as a drowning sailboat’s sail at sea,
broke branching cherry blossom sprays
above your blank, dug-gravel grave,
the air a lowered moaning
~as she drifted down the the sprig.
.
.
KURDISTAN
They’re singing Irish rebel songs
in Rojava today –
the sky reclaimed, a risen flame,
a world to make afresh –
a day of dust and disarray,
when David Graeber died
(a love-dishevelled comrade,
enamoring the fray).
The legionnaires of hate they hear,
the murder-music coming clear,
the slow devourings of war
seem even near
to idle me, enormously
in love with trees
as earth
begins to disappear.
I tremble at atrocity
and tramp across the town.
Within the hour,
a downward, blear, rampaging rain
alive and green outside his door,
the Kurdish barber holds my head
and shears me with a smile.
His hands are wired, lithe and lean;
we talk (he talks) of summer fishing.
By noon, I step
like sunlight into open air,
and he forgets that I was there.
The starlings sight my vanished hair
above and blur, murmuring
from me like a river. Their many-
weathered hum withdraws
as I unlock my scholar’s cell,
where peace re-settles
and I breathe the view:
a moss-resplendent ridge of roofs.
Nothing new. I sit like stone,
heron-thin, clean-cut, alone,
and listen as the echo grows
of all I miss the most in you.
One night, I felt our
fingers interlace across
a sea-rock, glowing
warm and blue
between us
on the shore, furling
into one another
like a flower. I knew
you then (my
every hour
glistened in the wave).
A strange distress
sustains me
as the iron seasons glower.
My rhythm-
fixed, in-rhyming mind
prescribes
a time-eluding cure:
erotic wonder, membering,
a tenderness that sings.
My godless gut
will dream tonight
of this and other things –
as ribboned light goes flickering
in smoke against the sky.