New Poems
| Eye of the Hare There! amongst lean-to grasses and trailing vetch catch her? – vagrant, free-range and alert; I saw the eager watch-tower of the ears, I knew the power of legs that would fling her into flight; concentrate, he said, and focus: you must love the soft-flesh shoulder-muscles where the bullet bites, caress – and do not jerk – the trigger: be all-embracing, be delicate. I had no difficulty with the saucepan lid down at the end of the meadow, lifted, for practice, against the rhododendron hedge, I could sight its smug self-satisfaction and shoot a hole pea-perfect and clean through. Attention to the hare left me perplexed for I, too, relish the vision I imaged in its round dark eye, of a green world easy under sunlight, of sweet sorrel and sacred herbs – and I turned away, embarrassed, and absolved. © John F. Deane September 2010 (from a forthcoming collection, Eye of the Hare, to be published by Carcanet in June 2011) |
| Bats The untamed prairie of the stars is shivering in evening breezes; bats come, small scraws of blackness flinging across the dusk; they celebrate their own cacophonies, in a register so high it hymns beyond human hearing; against the darkening woods they fly, swift as thought, precision instruments of their innocence, feeding, as we do best, on the invisible. Before dawn you can hear them settling back in their attic spaces, a furred gossiping and shouldering, the sound of a long communal sigh; we know they are gathering in a hot down-side-up clustering and lustiness, clinging fast above us who shift in our separate togetherness, settling on the troubled marlpool of our dreams. © John F. Deane November 2010 (from Eye of the Hare, published by Carcanet in June 2011) |
| Mimizan Plage I know the meaning of the words: hosanna and halleluia, the shout, and the long-drawn-out quavering belly-note: Betty, who could not dance, dancing for exuberance on the scullery table and Gerry shouting Dia leat! you, on the beach at Mimizan; porpoises beyond the waves at Keel, in slow ballet over and under the ocean, stitching the sea to sky; and you, on the beach at Mimizan; Róisín, not watching, Tim watching out as the car climbed through mile-high Italian villages; you, on the beach at Mimizan; jasmine blossoms, like milk-stars brilliant against a dark-green sky, scenting the suburbs; and you, on the beach at Mimizan, the red wine warming, salamis, olives, rolls, and our hearts thundering. from "Eye of the Hare" published by Carcanet in June 2011 |
| The Colliers They are born again out of the ribs of earth to stand a while, stunned by light, have crawled on bellies down constricted tunnels, along the guts of the underearth, have struggled with the dark implacable rock, dusts of a sojourn in the depths tickling their throat. They are astounded once again by gladioli, those upright, delicately blotched ciboria of light, though what they are in need of now is a draft of beer and a sluicing-down of flesh, coal-dust gritting tide-lines along the bath. Sunday they will kneel, awkwardly, at marble rails, eyes shut, palms joined, black under the fingernails; the immaculate hands of the priest will place white bread on their tongues, and blood of the risen Christ will wash through them, back into the veins of earth. from the forthcoming collection "Eye of the Hare" Carcanet May/June 2011 |
Sketch for the Statue of a Slave
The monastery gifted him cadavers, he would sculpt for them
a body crucified, shaping the cavity of a chest
strained into contortions, the scaffolding of the ribs
skewed against awful suffering; he had learned how the belly
is rounded out, and would sculpt a Bacchus, grapes for hair,
the flaccid serpent-stump yet idle, or cherubs
ripe with wisdom, and pubescent; marks of the chisel
a fleshly signature; awakening slave, a work
unfinished. More telling, so. Shadows are born
from the constant striking on the stone that makes
flesh flesh, and look! in spite of bone he knows
we are nursling spirits, grace-filled, and may soar;
that the killings stop, that the desecration of bodies
stop; Michelangelo has been, has left us David, the Pietà.
© John F. Deane April 2011
(from Eye of the Hare, published by Carcanet in June 2011)
The monastery gifted him cadavers, he would sculpt for them
a body crucified, shaping the cavity of a chest
strained into contortions, the scaffolding of the ribs
skewed against awful suffering; he had learned how the belly
is rounded out, and would sculpt a Bacchus, grapes for hair,
the flaccid serpent-stump yet idle, or cherubs
ripe with wisdom, and pubescent; marks of the chisel
a fleshly signature; awakening slave, a work
unfinished. More telling, so. Shadows are born
from the constant striking on the stone that makes
flesh flesh, and look! in spite of bone he knows
we are nursling spirits, grace-filled, and may soar;
that the killings stop, that the desecration of bodies
stop; Michelangelo has been, has left us David, the Pietà.
© John F. Deane April 2011
(from Eye of the Hare, published by Carcanet in June 2011)
| Viola d’Amore I had been playing Bach on the great organ – “A mighty fortress is our God” – the church below me empty in the nowhere afternoon, bombarde, clarion, celeste and when I lifted fingers from the keys it was, for a moment, eternity, and the walls of the world contained nothing but the lingering breadth of the harmony, rafters of the loft had lifted while the whole sky trembled in a breeze that rippled slow across it till all I knew was the touch of the fingers of Jesus soft on my fingertips, my body consciously drawing breath, my bones refusing their earthy weight, and my soul ringing with immortality. |
| Black and White A hush will settle in about you, even in the ruck of crowds and traffic, an expectation building (from within, without) and the words like a flock of redwing in the winter scutch-grass shifting to be noised up into movement, some ghosting memory, some vivifying stone or rainfall, finger-touch or weeping to take the long-forgotten back into treasury: like the Mercy sister, in constraining black and white, who comes scarily in through the music-room door, shoes knocking a hard rhythm on the wooden floor, books of scales and finger-exercises tight against the starched guimpe over her breasts as if Bach could never rise like larks out of the white notes, or Palestrina break in surf out of the black. |
| Amongst Women Perhaps he, too, called out from the womb in protest – and was not heard; nor should the woman know what shaped itself, or who. Perhaps she stood to watch herself shadowed on the wall, to rub, wonderingly, the taut elliptical globe of her belly, willing the hovering of the graces, to offer their gifts of wisdom, prophecy and of mortality. Until her knuckles gripped white against the wooden rails, sweat assaulting her skin, her shouts were of dismay and raking pain – how long O Lord how long – and that wet eyes-shut too-vulnerable creature was slapped and screaming his unwitting presence on the hard earth. Chosen. This time, this space. Out of all other possibilities. The why and wherefore unanswerable. A new life swaddled in comfort. Beginning, at once, to age. © John F. Deane 2012 |
