Then she began,
a rib curve,
urgent,
calling home
the unknown.
Raid
Night would not let me in,
without sleep, days turned grey
and empty, lying in wait
until the raven comes.
Her wings close my skull
in festered grip, her beak
breaks through the shell,
picks at the yolk of memory,
garbles up the vowels that cried
my childhood out, held my father’s death,
sucks into the crevice of her breath
the secrets I had kept,
makes vacant what is intimate.
Of a swoop, she is into flight,
the beat of feather oars slowly
break the air but leave no trace.
High above intricacies of marsh
to some unknown blackthorn
she ferries her ragged coffin,
doomed to become the grief
she so naively thieved.
Damage: A Conamara Cacophony
These stones in the wild
hold winter inside.
Their bleak quiet
unnerves the varicose bog.
Their rough faces
puncture light.
The wrestle
of aggressive grass
cuts windsong to gibberish.
The pools of bog
have tongues
that can lick
iron to nothing.
Now and then,
a raven
lines the air
with a black antiphon.
Gleninagh
The dark inside us is sistered outside
in night which dislikes the light of the face
and the colours the eye longs to embrace.
Night adores the mountain, wrapped to itself,
a giant heart beating beneath rock and grass
and a mind stilled inside one, sure thought.
Something has broken inside this Spring night,
unconsolably its rain teems unseen
onto Gleninagh Mountain’s listening depth.
Next morning the light is cleansed to behold
the glad milk of thirty streams pulse and spurt
out of unknown pores in the mountain’s hold.
Selves
From where she is
he seems singular,
clear as the silver
longing of the moon
filling the memory
of an empty ruin,
still hidden, despite
the hunger of light
and night’s dark preference
for burnt fragment.
He appears to be
relieved of the seeping
dross of nuance
no one but the stone
can name him now.
She grew somehow
haunted by the continuous
blue of his crevice voice
knew soon that a complete cry
even if he could make it
might leave nothing.
She rages, forgets
dreams of the ancestral
ocean coming
pouring over
the horizon.
Tropism
Tight ground
grips you
hips below clay
legs knotted
into one root,
its toothed eye
bites deep
into the dark
of the buried nest
where thoughts ground.
Hunger is your
only compass.
You must have
locked
onto granite.
The stem of your back
is beautiful,
were it not for
the yellow leaves
of your mind,
flaking.
Outside Memory
Concealed within daylight,
the dead emerge to work
the fields of night.
Their fingers slip
through the gauze of sleep,
sift the loam of dream,
hour after hour
for pictures
of their lost faces.
Their cold tongues
stop the breath of trees,
wet the sides of rock,
eager to root out
relics of voice.
The beat of their feet
drums road and path
with every sound
and rhythm of walk,
begs the ground
to recall their footsteps.
Their white eyes,
moons in miniature,
beseech well and river
to stop awhile
and be their mirror.
Chosen
I
She has become
a country woman,
arms brawny,
hair mangled
in a greasy cap,
features winnowed,
eyes accustomed,
gestures gapped.
She can now bring
the hazel stick down
raw over warm
animals’ backs,
empty cows’ dugs
into galvanized buckets,
wheaten the yard corner
for gossipy hens.
II
Impaled in fright,
she has keened
the tender ground
of paddocked night,
learned to become
immune within
when the flailing begins
in search of relief
then falls aside
lost in sleep.
III
In the sunday church
the same pale priest
winds dead talk
in dark wreathes
around their minds.
The spotless host
baked by some nun
is fit for altar
not for table,
bread of the white life.
Nor does the wine body
any languid remembrance
of swelling sun,
bottled for the altar
in a stone abbey
by an enclosed order.
Later, special offers
written on the windows
of the local store,
and just inside the door
milk-skinned models
leer in coy surprise
from covers of tabloids.
IV
Under the frame
of their stubborn farm
a stream has catacombed,
won echo-room
to hear its pilgrim mind
decipher the intention
of freed fossiled stone,
mingle the memory
of tendril and bone,
touch the turbulence
of the unknown,
unchosen clay,
in the forbidden region,
where light and form
have nothing to say.
She is often drawn
along its rumble line
to the spring well
where its face
appears to form.
She likes to sit,
watch the cattle come,
one by one;
each huge head
for a while
conceals the well,
gleans its fill,
will gaze with dark
moon eyes ever
deeper there,
as if astonished
at the water veil.
Some extend her
that oracled stare
of animal to human;
then turn around again
to graze the ground.
V
Since what is
gradual becomes less
and less visible,
she noticed most
the early hurt.
She came first
graceful, young
fell in soon
with farmwork.
Love only made her
more lonely still,
for herself and for him,
his breath on her skin,
his surge filling her
to empty himself
of the unease
that love kindled
between them.
Then, one day
within her
the raw beat
relented.
Suddenly
she saw herself
forever marooned
between land and man.
