Of vivid presence, where journeys are not
Stretched over distance, and time
Is beyond the fatality of before and
After, and elsewhere and otherwise
Do not intrude on day or night.
FLUENT
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
THE STILLNESS ABOVE IS LISTENING
Rooted in the quiet earth beneath
Which enjoys the quiver as harebells
Relinquish perfect scoops of breeze
Absorbs the syllables when rain lowers
Its silver chorus to coalesce
With granite rocks terse with thirst
And tight with the force of unfreed voice
Feels the moon on its fields brightening
The length of night out into the nowhere
That would love a name like Conamara
The mountain remains a temple of listening
Over years its contours concede to the lonesome
Voices brittle with the threat of what is gathering
Towards their definite houses below
Harvesting the fragments of sound
Into its weight of stillness.
MOUNTAIN CHRISTENING
For Nöel Hanlon
Poor wounded name! my bosom, as a bed shall lodge thee…
—SHAKESPEARE
After a hard climb
Through a dry river-bed,
Its scoured stones glistening
Like a white chain to the horizon,
Descending between its links
The long concerto of a stream
Where the listening mountains incline,
Rising against the steep fall of soft bog,
Searching for our grip
In the shimmer of scree.
At last on the summit
Of the Beanna Beola,
Overlooking three valleys,
Delighted to be so high
Above the lives where we dwell,
Together for a while
From other sides of the world,
Sensing each other,
Strangely close,
Suddenly, your voice
Calling out my name.
I call yours.
The echoes take us
To the heart of the mountains.
When the silence closes,
You say: Now that they
Have called our names back
The mountains can
Never forget us.
THE NIGHT UNDERNEATH
Night carries blame for dream and
The other worlds, you become
Mother opening the door to
Walk inside the colour blue
Where animals wear haloes.
Frescoes that evaporate
Into the grey wall of dawn.
You waken to continue on.
Shake yourself free from the night,
Continue with yesterday’s life.
Under the day’s white surface
All the scripture has withered.
No word, no sound to be heard
In the long wind that reaps dust
From all the harvest of voice.
And the mind behind it all
Has dried up, left nothing but
Its ghost imprint active still
Listening to your footsteps fall,
Their music of red shadows,
Knowing that sooner or later
Some distant light will flicker,
Your blind feet will stumble on
That frail place to send your weight
Through the depth of paper earth.
DECORUM
In the winter night
By the lake edge
A stern breeze makes
The young novices
Of reed bend
Low and bow
To the mystery
Of a shadow-mountain,
Gathered the moment
The cloud freed the moon.
IMAGINED ORIGINS
For M.
Nothing between us, so near
I hear your skin whisper
What you could never tell
Of the longing that called us.
How through the branches
On to the clay beneath the oak,
A lace of light came down
To wait and watch each day,
And the secrecy of the breeze,
Dying down over the shiver
In the earth, hovering there
To blend its voice to breath,
How, even then, the rain
Through the brow of grasses
Could foreshadow tears
And the trickle of water change,
Or the fright of crows from trees
At dusk into the empty paleness,
This rush of black words today
Searching for you on the white page.
ENCOUNTERS
THE ROSARY SONNETS
For Noel Dermot O’Donoghue
and in memory of Pete and Paddy O’Donohue
—JN 1:14.
Love, like fire, can only reveal its brightness
On the failure and beauty of burnt wood.
—PHILIPPE JACCOTTET
To stand in the shadow
of the scar up in the air.
—PAUL CELAN
AN PAIDRÍN
I gcuimhne ar Cyril Ó Céirín
Ar nós cheoil na farraige
Tagtha sa bhfoscadh
Ar an teallach
Ag brionglóidí uirthi féin,
An bhrionglóid chéanna
Ó i bhfad i gcéin
Ag snámh go séimh
Idir thrá agus tuile
Na Sé do bheatha, a Mhuire.
THE ROSARY
As though the music of the ocean
Had come to shelter
On the home hearth
Dreaming of itself
In the selfsame dream
From a far distant region
In buoyant ease
Between the fill and fall
Of waves of Hail Marys.
The Joyful Mysteries
THE ANNUNCIATION
Cast from afar before the stones were born
And rain had rinsed the darkness for colour,
The words have waited for the hunger in her
To become the silence where they could form.
The day’s last light frames her by the window,
A young woman with distance in her gaze,
She could never imagine the surprise
That is hovering over her life now.
The sentence awakens like a raven,
Fluttering and dark, opening her heart
To nest the voice that first whispered the earth
From dream into wind, stone, sky and ocean.
She offers to mother the shadow’s child;
Her untouched life becoming wild inside.
THE VISITATION
In the morning it takes the mind a while
To find the world again, lost after dream
Has taken the heart to the underworld
To play with the shades of lives not chosen.
She awakens a stranger in her own life,
Her breath loud in the room full of listening.
