The messenger comes from that distant place
Beside us where we cannot remember
How unlikely it is that we are here,
Keepers of interiors not our own,
Strangers in whom dawn and twilight are one.
When the black door opens, she often appears,
Keeping her distance from the house of grief,
Circling it with her cry until her tears
Have cut a path to the nerve of a name
That soon will stand alone on a headstone.
No one has seen her face or can fathom
Why she comes so far to mourn a stranger.
She is no Rachel weeping for her children,
No Cassandra doomed to remain unheard,
She is the first voice from the other world.
It seems the camera’s eye caught her form
Hunched inside a waterfall in Mweelrea.
Is it there she collects tears of delight
Sure that death is bright, or worn down with grief
Must she drink from her Conamara Lethe?
WIND ARTIST
For Ellen Wingard
Among the kingdom of the winds,
Perhaps, there is one of elegant mind
Who has no need to intrude
On the solitude of single things.
A wind at ease with the depth
Of its own emptiness, who knows
How it was in the beginning,
Before the silence became unbearable
And space rippled to dream things.
A wind who feels how an object strains
To be here, holding its darkness tight
Against the sever of air, ever eager
To enter, and with a swell of light
Dissolve the form in its breathing.
A wind from before memory
Whose patience will see things become
Passionate dust whorled into sighs
Of ghost-song on its wings.
ELEMENTAL
Is the word the work
Of someone who tills the blue field,
Unearths its dark plenitude
For the tight seed to release its thought
Into the ferment of clay,
Searching to earth the light
And come to voice in a word of grain
That can sing free in the breeze,
Bathe in the yellow well of the sun,
Avoid the attack of the bird,
And endure the red cell of the oven
Until memory leavens in the gift of bread?
THE PLEADING
All night long, and all through the white day,
The beat of the wind’s bulk against the house,
Pausing only for a breath, and then, again,
The rise and wail of its keening, as if I
Could come out into it, and answer
Its unbearable grief with some sweet name,
From which it could make an antiphon
To calm down its demented legion
Of breezes, or failing that, could I find
And release a granite rock, to open
A duct in the mountain, for it to enter
And search the underworld for itself.
THE SECRET OF THERENESS
For Martin Downey
And the earth fled to the lowest place.*
And the mystery of the breeze,
Arising from nowhere, could be
A return of unrequited memory
Awake at last to a sense of loss,
Stirring up the presences in these fields,
Clutches of thistle roll their purple eyes,
Grasses wave in a trembling whisper,
Profusions of leaf dance slowly
On the low spires of rowan trees;
In fields and walls the granite ones
Never waver from stillness, stones
Who know a life without desire,
Each dwells in its own distance
From night acclaimed by twilight
And day released through dawn.
Utterly focused in their stance,
Stones praise the silence of time.
BREAKAGE
Life sentence. First night.
Whistles from cages in Hades.
Black dog. He breathes for me.
Nowhere. Dead air.
Months later. All normal.
Then, it hit her.
Found letters. Too late.
The shock of who she was.
Labour pains. Relief.
Then, the child. Damaged.
INNER CIRCLE
For John Moriarty
Stranger sometimes than the yellow crotchet
Of glimpses that civilize the dark, or the
Shelter of voices who stall the dead
Silence that longs to return to stone,
Stranger is the heart, a different scripture,
Weighed down by thoughts of gods
Who will never emerge, to recommend
One way above another to anywhere,
Lest they distract from the festival
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