matted with the cockroach phrases
of other voices that
crawled in to hurt.
He stops
when he sees
the white scroll
and backs off
from its silence.
Exiled Clay
I am not sure you
live anywhere, no
cord of clay holds
you moored.
The air is brittle
and cannot settle
near your attention.
Your cell has
no cloister, for
abandon anoints you.
To what place
belongs the red bush
of your blood?
Who could travel
your mountains of dream,
glimpse gazelles
limp towards dawn,
see flowers
thirst through earth
for dew,
and hear at least
the sound
of swan’s wings
bless the dark?
Instead of Kissing the Cross …
The Good Friday altar is bleak
three crosses, rough with nails,
we are meant to think
of someone in pain, approach
a cross, each step a prayer,
and take a nail to lighten
the burden. I think of you,
the torture of the last year,
the trembling, no sleep, the change
in life turning your soul into
a refugee, with tears I take
the nail of pain away and promise
my shoulder beneath your cross.
Tonight for the first time
you are able to talk.
I find that it is I
who helped you
to that bleak place,
where no certainty
can ever settle.
Anything Can Come
I
Oh
the white utopia
of her mind.
Each thought is worked
until it is hard and pale.
It takes years of prayer.
Even the smear marks
of childhood erase.
But
the intentions of the rain
are not innocent, it falls
and falls upon her sleep
to soften the pavements.
Eventually
a horse, concepted
clear and royal,
brooms the cloister
with a tail of ravens.
Flint beaks spark
voices in the stone:
II
“Receive the night
from whom you come,
who longs to enfold you
since the womb.
No.
Do not look back.
For there is a man
with long palms about
to place for you
a black moon
on each shoulder.
Your face exposes you.
How you dream
of its features receding
to a nondescript
plate of white.
Unkindly, light leaves
but the memory
flicker of being
happy once
with your doll
and your daddy
in the church
until a burly,
shorthorn bull
got in a sidedoor
and up the aisle,
no one dared
to stop him,
delicately lowing,
he placed
his wild head
all over
the tabernacle.”
Young Mind
A thurible swings
longingly
against the will
of the wind
keeping time
with the red moons
of charcoal
that burn fragrance
from sands
of incense.
Broken Moon
The moon
came down
into the cellar.
Out of its silver well,
their hind legs
leaving splashes,
come the rats.
Expectation
Too long stranded in the air, the land loves
the innocence of the incoming sea,
perfectly she ascends to fill its loss
of ground in a swell of blue energy.
Land lies under life and cannot come up
or close against the rain of sound and touch,
has to absorb night and day, leaves and bone,
take them below to where the air stores time.
In coils of wave, winding in dance, the sea
is too fluent to feel its own silence,
only for the sure gaze and grip of shore
it would not know itself to be the sea.
Held for a while, the sea is satisfied,
then she pulls her silk of water away
into the independence of blue;
shawls of weed fall off, show how tide chews rock.
Nothingness:
The Secret of the Cross
This land would like to fold
its surface into peaks,
let no feet touch it.
The heavy sun leans
on black bedouin tents
that cover the nomad’s mind.
Here light has no mercy,
shadows are wounds
that blacken the sand.
Olive trees stand up,
gargoyles fed on
distant, buried moisture.
The mountains of Moab
severe and white, salt
the gaze and turn it back.
Even the wind is red
when it comes, it swarms
with insidious sands.
No blue door opens in to
the infinite, in this land
the eyes of Jesus saw
nothing.
Self-Distance
Near me
scents of bath oil
veiled by her dress.
Near me
in a language I cannot receive
a lone tree stirs
to nurse the air.
Near me
the dark crouched
in you leaks to
soot the light.
Near me
estranged from his bones in Fanore
the silence of my father
hears me.
Near me
the frustration, the invisible
sculptures, thoughts make
on unmirrored air.
Around me
black streams
through the silence
of white bone.
Somewhere inside
the wings of the heart
make their own skies.
In me
a tenderness I find
hard to allow.
Ich wünsche mir
I wish for
swiftness,
limb to light
to be
gone beyond
the white, bleached
field,
ploughed
by the lone crow’s
beak.
Cottage
I sit, alert
behind the small window
of my mind and watch
the days pass,
strangers,
who have no reason
to look in.
The Voyage of Gentians
Through this fester of bony earth, trying
to avoid on their way the snares of root
that trap whatever leaves the dark, what do
these tribes of blue gentian come up here for?
Is it enough for them to climb onto
this April day above in Caherbeanna
into light confused with yellow and grey
and whorled by the song of a cuckoo?
Betrayed by Light
The first breath of morning breaks the dark enough
to let the sky out of night, it gathers up
the trust of trees that leaned with such relief
