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John O’Donohue
Conamara Blues
Poems
IN MEMORY OF MY AUNT,
Mary O’Donohue
(1896–1923)
of Caherbeanna, who died
in a tragic road accident shortly
after her emigration to America
Contents
Approachings
Thought-Work
First Words
Nest
Black Music in Conamara
The Wound at the Side of the House
Before the Beginning
The Banshee’s Grotto
Wind Artist
Elemental
The Pleading
The Secret of Thereness
Breakage
Inner Circle
Fluent
The Stillness Above is Listening
Mountain Christening
The Night Underneath
Decorum
Imagined Origins
Encounters:
The Rosary Sonnets
An Paidrín
The Rosary
The Joyful Mysteries
The Annunciation
The Visitation
The Nativity
The Presentation in the Temple
The Finding in the Temple
The Sorrowful Mysteries
The Agony in the Garden
The Scourging at the Pillar
The Crowning with Thorns
The Carrying of the Cross
The Crucifixion
The Glorious Mysteries
The Resurrection
The Ascension
The Descent of the Holy Spirit
The Assumption
The Coronation
Distances
Words
Wings
The Transparent Border
The Angel of the Bog
Placenta
Mountain-Looking
Seduced?
At the Edge
Up the Mountain
Prisons of Voice
The Ocean Wind
Outside a Cottage
Breakage
Double Exposure
Elemental
The Night
Anchor
A Burren Prayer
Notes
Index of First Lines
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by John O’Donohue
Copyright
About the Publisher
APPROACHINGS
I want to watch watching arrive.
I want to watch arrivances.
—HÉLÉNE CIXOUS
I think back gladly on the future.
—HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBENGER
Think of things that disappear.
Think of what you love best,
What brings tears to your eyes.
Something that said
Before you knew what it meant
Or how long it was for.
—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
THOUGHT-WORK
In memory of Joe Pilkington
Off course from the frail music sought by words
And the path that always claims the journey,
In the pursuit of a more oblique rhythm,
Creating mostly its own geography,
The mind is an old crow
Who knows only to gather dead twigs,
Then take them back to the vacancy
Between the branches of the parent tree
And entwine them around the emptiness
With silence and unfailing patience
Until what was fallen, withered and lost
Is now set to fill with dreams as a nest.
FIRST WORDS
For Shane O’Donohue
Parents know not what they do
When they coax those first words
Out of you, start a trickle
Of saying that will not cease.
Long after they no longer hear
Your talk, the words they started
Continue to call out for someone
To come near enough to hear
The cadence of what has happened
Deep in the inevitable growing
Heavy and weary of heart
Under the layer of days
Where memory works cold fusions,
As if your voice could carry you
Out of the stillness to the warmth
Of someone who would linger with you
To search the frozen parts for tears
Until a forgotten line fires
Down through the word-hoard
To where your first silence was
Broken, and your rhythm born.
NEST
For J.
I awaken
To find your head
Loaded with sleep,
Branching my chest.
Feel the streams
Of your breathing
Dream through my heart.
From the new day,
Light glimpses
The nape of your neck.
Tender is the weight
Of your sleeping thought
And all the worlds
That will come back
When you raise your head
And look.
BLACK MUSIC IN CONAMARA
For John Barry
To travel through the trough
Of this Sunday afternoon,
As mist thickens into a screen
All over Conamara,
Holding the mountains back
From the clarity their stern solitude
Strives after, releasing the spring
Lustre of the long grass, ever further
Into a fervence of indigo, so much
So that the granite rocks strewn about
Seem eventually abstract, afterthoughts
To something that took place before them.
Take the silver bucket
Full of coarse turf cut from under here;
Light its brown shape in the grate
Until it blooms into a red well.
Put on a disc of smooth steel
That slowly builds, yields up a pulse
Of jazz from Roland Kirk,
Who never was here, but somehow
Played a live concert once, so full
Of the withheld litany
Of this shy, Conamara day.
The saxaphone catches onto
Some riff of murmur,
Deep beneath the roots of the mountains,
Where granite relents, giving way
In tears, to the blanket poultice of the bog.
THE WOUND AT THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE
For Pat O’ Brien
The glistening, neon dome
Turned the night bathroom,
With its window open,
Into an addictive sanctuary
Which had drawn in
The masses of the night.
Thousands of demented ephemerae,
Needle specks of shivering flies,
Moths and myriad winged things
Congregate around its merciless,
Unrelenting light.
Having waited all day for the daylight
And its vestal colours to leave,
They arose from the bog,
Navigating rushes, grasses and briars.
Rising into the wonder
Of this night, with its moon
Casting mint light from behind
The mountains of Conamara.
On the adventure
Of their few hours of life here,
They had the misfortune
To pass by on this side of the house
