of children,
meeting everything
dirt blobs jewelled,
rusty strips of tin,
ducks, dogs, flowers,
cows moored
deep in grass,
taking time to fathom
the unrelenting land,
these days,
as the maze
of silver briar
tightens in my skull.
Fossil
No
don’t cry
for there is no
one to tell,
a mild shell
spreads
over every opening
every ear
eye
mouth
pore
nose
genital,
a mildness of shell
impenetrable
to even
the bladed scream;
soon
all will be
severed echo,
and the dead
so long
so unbearably long
outside and
neglected
will claim
their time.
Woman and Steel
Homage á Susanna Solano,
Painter now working in sculpture
Was it evening in Barcelona, when
you lost the obedience of your hands
to stir the liquids of colour and turn
thirsts of canvas to yellow, blue and green?
Something startled clay alive inside you
to show how roots squeeze earth to hold trees down,
how the water dreams to assemble a stream,
how layers of air breathe off crests of wave
and a skin of green holds a mountain in.
Surface tempts your eye no more, you scrape
a pink granite from your latest still life.
For days you look at nothing but air,
the mother of shape who loans breath to thought,
skin to clay and withers colour to grey.
As the hole deepens, the echoes dry up.
You despair of the form that closes
the painted space, a picture near a wall;
urgently, you reach for metal and steel
to shape desperate cages for the air.
II—Hungers of Distance
A wind moving round all sides,
a wind shaking the points of view out
like the last bits of rain …
JORIE GRAHAM
Purgatorial
Beneath me sleep
splits like pliant silk,
I drop derelict
into a bare dream,
where my language,
dry as paper
is being burned
by a young child
over a black stove.
I cannot see his face,
but feel the fearsome
power of his play.
His uncanny hands
herd every private word
back to its babble shape,
fixes them in lines,
mutters at the order
then, in a swerve
drives them over the edge
into the fire’s mass
of murmuring tongues.
He takes too
my inner antiphon
of wild, wind-christened
placenames:
Caherbeanna,
Creig na Bhfeadóg,
Poll na Gcolm,
Ceann Boirne.
My weak words
crust the pages.
Our shy night-words,
which no other had heard,
he spatters with
yellow laughter;
to crackle like
honey in the flame.
I am glad to see his
fingers grab the sheets,
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.