New Poems
| The Marble Rail I came up against the marble rail, carrying a weight of Latin and other mysteries: men on the left side, women on the right. I got down to studying heads of horses on the women's scarves, how big men knelt, one knee down on cap or hanky, left hand to the jaw, eyes loose, fingers twitching. There was acknowledged presence of a people's God, snuffling, reticent, unwilling and cajoled; I took the strange moon-bread they fed me and turned a half a century down the aisle to where I still attend, waiting among a frail seniority of old Ireland, and the blood of the God has the savour of vintage sherry and His flesh is a melting of ashes across the tongue. March 2010 |
Public House
It stood, discreet, amongst honest houses,
porter barrels tolling by the wall outside; within,
a flagstone floor, a fudge of smoke and hawking,
the round man behind the bar taciturn, graceless;
mother said it was the heaving weather of original sin
drew him in, for we are transients, pilgrims, falling
to our knees at times before unholy shrines. Began,
for him, as a faltering of resolution and he ducked,
disarmed, into the darkness, as the will falls
like a green bottle smashing itself against the flags.
But there were times, countering it, he crossed
the highest furrows of the mountainside, hunting
for goat, its wild slithering, its grazing; the bullet
in the flesh-flank of the beast was a love-song
and a gesture of despair. He stood to watch
the richening gold-light on the corrie hill,
a heaven-beam, Genesis-feet, that moved across
the mountain-side; and stood to listen to the gulls
in the next-door harbour at their disputations
speak the week’s histories of calamitous events:
the tarnished china of a sheepskull and the windy
acres of its eyes, the battling through against harsh days.
Thislife, say the gulls, is that unstable province
where we scavenge behind the trawlers’ arabesques,
while the human dead are taken down
into the heaving, unlit corrie
of the waves, where they fall, disarmed and slow,
down, down out of all weathers, down, like seeds.
December 2009
It stood, discreet, amongst honest houses,
porter barrels tolling by the wall outside; within,
a flagstone floor, a fudge of smoke and hawking,
the round man behind the bar taciturn, graceless;
mother said it was the heaving weather of original sin
drew him in, for we are transients, pilgrims, falling
to our knees at times before unholy shrines. Began,
for him, as a faltering of resolution and he ducked,
disarmed, into the darkness, as the will falls
like a green bottle smashing itself against the flags.
But there were times, countering it, he crossed
the highest furrows of the mountainside, hunting
for goat, its wild slithering, its grazing; the bullet
in the flesh-flank of the beast was a love-song
and a gesture of despair. He stood to watch
the richening gold-light on the corrie hill,
a heaven-beam, Genesis-feet, that moved across
the mountain-side; and stood to listen to the gulls
in the next-door harbour at their disputations
speak the week’s histories of calamitous events:
the tarnished china of a sheepskull and the windy
acres of its eyes, the battling through against harsh days.
Thislife, say the gulls, is that unstable province
where we scavenge behind the trawlers’ arabesques,
while the human dead are taken down
into the heaving, unlit corrie
of the waves, where they fall, disarmed and slow,
down, down out of all weathers, down, like seeds.
December 2009
Shelf-Life
From a side-hook in the pantry, Old Moore's
Almanac for 1943, its pages browned from the pipe-smoke
of Grandpa Time, and one china cup without its handles,
a small blue boat drifting towards the bridge; one
Knock-shrine mug, repository for two brass keys
that have lost their locks; a brawn-coloured oval
roasting-dish, its cracked-over surface criss-crossed
with the trackways of old Europe; a Rowntree's Cocoa tin,
its comely maiden watching out onto hurrying time
with a face of wonder; a carriage-clock without its hands,
standing in its final after-tock; Hallow-e'en tin rings
without their lustre; a Brigid's Cross, the rushes dried
brittle as old wicks; and there, in a cardboard box,
the mixed-up bits of Lego, Meccano, jigsaws, those
building blocks of a world to be. Two off-green, birthday
balloons, wrinkled and out-of-breath, string still knotted
like scarves on their scrawny necks, and there, on the top shelf
my tin-ware porringer from lunch-time school, long emptied
of my peaceful indifference to all things. Finally, me, here
mooching about in my ghosthood over shelves no longer there.
January 2010
From a side-hook in the pantry, Old Moore's
Almanac for 1943, its pages browned from the pipe-smoke
of Grandpa Time, and one china cup without its handles,
a small blue boat drifting towards the bridge; one
Knock-shrine mug, repository for two brass keys
that have lost their locks; a brawn-coloured oval
roasting-dish, its cracked-over surface criss-crossed
with the trackways of old Europe; a Rowntree's Cocoa tin,
its comely maiden watching out onto hurrying time
with a face of wonder; a carriage-clock without its hands,
standing in its final after-tock; Hallow-e'en tin rings
without their lustre; a Brigid's Cross, the rushes dried
brittle as old wicks; and there, in a cardboard box,
the mixed-up bits of Lego, Meccano, jigsaws, those
building blocks of a world to be. Two off-green, birthday
balloons, wrinkled and out-of-breath, string still knotted
like scarves on their scrawny necks, and there, on the top shelf
my tin-ware porringer from lunch-time school, long emptied
of my peaceful indifference to all things. Finally, me, here
mooching about in my ghosthood over shelves no longer there.
January 2010
The Tombs
We came then, Fred and I, to squeeze our spreading flesh
through an iron stile into the field;
sheep and fattening lambs shifted uneasily, their droppings
everywhere in grass;
a chaffinch-song came criss-cross from an ash;
the mound, at Dowth,
has long collapsed, stones hauled away for shed or byre;
there would have been, perhaps, a boulder
drawn across the entrance to the tomb,
now only iron grilles and rusted locks,
the shaft within disappearing into darkness,
down amongst the long-lost sons
of gravity. The poet, out of Boston – its high-rise, its interlacing
under-passageways for trains –
sent photos home by cell phone, to Arlington Massachusetts,
questions again of light those stone-age
great-great-grandfathers of ours might have known as fire,
their task to heave up stone on stone
as if the source of light could be held inside a tomb, released,
say once a year
like cattle out from the hot stable-reek onto bright pastures;
initials, near illegible, though chiselled
onto coping stones, have been dusting away for centuries
back into the air we breathe.
for Fred Marchant
April 2010
We came then, Fred and I, to squeeze our spreading flesh
through an iron stile into the field;
sheep and fattening lambs shifted uneasily, their droppings
everywhere in grass;
a chaffinch-song came criss-cross from an ash;
the mound, at Dowth,
has long collapsed, stones hauled away for shed or byre;
there would have been, perhaps, a boulder
drawn across the entrance to the tomb,
now only iron grilles and rusted locks,
the shaft within disappearing into darkness,
down amongst the long-lost sons
of gravity. The poet, out of Boston – its high-rise, its interlacing
under-passageways for trains –
sent photos home by cell phone, to Arlington Massachusetts,
questions again of light those stone-age
great-great-grandfathers of ours might have known as fire,
their task to heave up stone on stone
as if the source of light could be held inside a tomb, released,
say once a year
like cattle out from the hot stable-reek onto bright pastures;
initials, near illegible, though chiselled
onto coping stones, have been dusting away for centuries
back into the air we breathe.
for Fred Marchant
April 2010
