Peter Wojnarowicz

Skinless on the wet sidewalks of Times Square,

He hustled to survive, an abused kid.

On perilous Christopher Street pier,

Its urine-smelling shadows,

Where men’s hungry lips traced lines
down men’s lonely bellies,
He could breathe the freedom of birds.

On the warehouse loading dock on the Hudson,
He drank a coffee from the Silver Dollar.

And read Funeral Rites under the swamp-yellow glow,

Headlights moved across a wall;

The ocean tested the rotting pier posts;

Tin doors complained out loud like seagulls;

His Marcel Duchamp was flaking off the wall;

A rock had holed Rimbaud’s face on a window;

The place was dying like secret hobo railyard lore.

The reel behind his stoned eyeballs saw

A junkie saviour serene above criminal Saint Genet.

He could teach Jesus to be serious
About the least of his brothers.

She thinks of Aleppo

She watches the sea twinkling blue and green

and the boats brighten in the small harbour

as if they have heard rumours of sun and wind.

The mastheads quicken and wave the wind in

to the sound of ropes against metal and wood.

She asks me, Do vegans’ bodies rot more quickly?

She tilts her head back to the buttermilk sky,

Gulps a scalded tang of salt and surf and sun.

An agile yachtsman steers his boat out to sea

With the easy familiarity of an old postman

Gripping the handlebars of his bicycle.

She says, What counts is the living, the eating,

the drinking, the sleeping, the laughing, the loving

that every soul needs. A fisherman unloads

a sheen of striated fish from his blue-and-white boat.

Sapped wills flap blue and black light in the box.

On the shore a hulk is splayed open like a gutted fish.

She says, When I saw them crawling in the square

they looked like lizards dipped in dust but it was the children,

their skin burned off and their bodies broken.

The sweat shines in drops on her forehead and lips,

trickles with her tears in streams down her cheeks.

She watches the white wake of the boat cleaving the water.

She says, We die into the blackness of fainting but the mind

and memory can live on in writing. She thinks of Aleppo. 

ancestral

The ice sheets tore welts in the earth,

Like six furry spodeks – the Comeraghs.

The sea churned gravel-raking storms.

The rain stirred mud into the streams.

His ancestors planted their feet there.

Now, the keening of days sounds from the falls.

The branches of suspicious trees eye the valleys.

Where turf-smoke verses rent by the wind

Made banal prose of the pyre of his past,

The sheep have laid waste to the stone walls.

Lichened apple trees lament at the stream’s edge.

Bracken and thistles scratch my skin

In the fields that once were freshly ploughed,

Or pastured, as if I must expiate his degradation,

By planting seeds of redemption in the meadow.

I yank the front door and it shifts on its hinges.

The cottage walls stare at each other behind manky curtains.

In the pots and pans in the shadows I sense his life.

In the open-book fireplace his name is burnt.

Like windfall fruit his books are pulping in the press.

His raft crashed against the rocks of a harsh mantra:

A viable farm had to measure up as an economic unit.

He retreated like a gastropod into his lonely conch.

He lived on - killing time until time killed him.

I had forgotten that once I remembered him.

He laughed when I found the hens’ nests in the field

Where threshing left straw mattresses on the ground.

Economics laughed his life into the mountain’s clay.

The molten core of the earth warms his Nire grave.

But in the void he tumbled to the bottom of my mind.

The rays from the Nire river are razor blades in my eyes.

Under the bridge it foams white at the mouth.

A tree bleeds sap to mirror only the shades of the sky.

The clouds are mummies in buttermilk bandages.

A cat’s tail tempts it to whirl in circles on the flagstone.

Words will discover

Three hippies from the garden centre cross the bridge,

Looking like seconds on a shelf of messiahs.

I play with the stream waiting for word sounds to flow.

Like the rust-flanked redwings on my snowy lawn

Ripping the berries from the cotoneaster,

Will word shapes discover my white sheet of paper?

Like verse rhyming through a halo of high rigging,

Snowflakes float down through an umbrella of lamplight,

Swirl like dreams into a dizzying bell of white.

Some drift down and frost the river for a second.

I want words to tongue-stick to my glacier of brain.

Blaze ink! Lick, pen, this iced page with your tongue of fire!

Haiku

Mowada hangs from eaves

Ready for winter weaving

The bag has a bark

Draught horse gallops hard

In rhythm of up and down

Summer rides bareback

Autumn blows maple

Through an open wooden door

Trees shed October

A runner zooms by

Bees sip juices from blossoms

The world is buzzing

Elephants hosing

Water at one another

The pool laughs out loud

In Kikita’s springs

Mount Fuji’s purity loves

Wrinklehead Sculpins

Dragonflies dry wings

A frog grabs a grasshopper

Storks feed once again

Blue ceramic bowl

Tea brushed to peacefulness

Quenches inner thirst

Green frog on a rice leaf

Waits till it’s his time to call

Plop! – watercolours

Crabs scuttle beneath

the wasabi greening sand

under the alder

Pure water washes

Sand from the wasabi fields

Back into the stream

clouds, intensely blue,
find a mirror in the water,
turn violet there.

Idioms

He spoke idioms that made me smile.  

Heavy rain would ‘drench you to the skin’.

A severe wind would ‘clean corn’.

He pronounced ‘clean’ as ‘clane’.

Or if someone added fuel to the fire of a fight

He’d shrug, ‘Skitter flies high when hit with a stick.’

And if you told a good story, he’d chuckle,

‘That one’s worth putting up on top of the dresser.’

His soft-hearted wife would ‘cry for the ducks going barefoot’.

It’s not that he had a knapsack of clichés.

It’s that he thought it all worth saying.

It was his heart’s desire to say something

That rattled the word chest and gave

language a dunt with the elbow of his tongue.

‘Dullness wasn’t worth the full of your arse

of boiled snow.’ Because he wanted you to listen.

Bring a name

The roots of trees bond the earth 
and hold the ground up.
Not the poplars, or the birches, 
threading the morning sun.

We trust our legs to walk what 
might have been a swamp.

Don’t bring me all the facts if you 
have them to hand.

Don’t bring me a suitcase, glasses, 
a woman’s wig,

Nor a menorah if I ask for 
candlelight.

Bring a name, like a bird with a twig
 in its beak,

As the wind carries grains of salt 
and grains of ash -

Hartzog, Zylberman, Cohen, 
Fleischman, Barron, Wolf -

I have no memory of them to keep 
this boat

Afloat on the green waters 
windowing their grave.
Who will see the stones my left
hand leaves?

Cold and Want In Dungarvan

Blight crosses the wave-groomed coast. Grips Dungarvan.

The rector writes that famine is sore in the land.

Spud stalks rot as if locusts have devoured them.

Stooped forms in muck lanes have faces like hooked fish.

The gentlest breeze could blow their skeletons to dust.

Men are picking stones from Abbeyside Beach for one shilling a day.

Bad landlords tumble down cabins leaving the people homeless.

Devonshire’s agent is putting cattle seized for rent in the pound.

Fearful shopkeepers keep a weary watch all night.

The town is like a fox crushed in a deadfall slab-stone trap.

The Union Workhouse is full of sick starving people.

The doctor notes dropsy, diarrhoea, whooping cough, opthalmia.

Winter snows in. Barefoot paupers are told to return

Each day for rations, to have their “destitution” tested.

A woman who has walked twenty miles for Indian meal

Dies in tatters in a drift of snow. Dogs gnaw a boy’s legs.

When hungry paupers riot the Hussars draw their swords.

Power falls like a stuck pig on the butcher’s block.

Fr Toomy waits at the back gate of the Workhouse

With holy water to bless the corpses in the dead cart.

He checks to make sure the withered forms are dead.

Starving people grub up the roots of turnips to eat.

Farmers are eating seed potatoes. Next year’s crop.

A baker doles out black slate-hard biscuits no one can eat.

Skin-bags of bones litter the lanes and fields like rotten sheep.

They melt into the primal clay by the sides of ditches.

A woman carts her dead son, begging money to buy a coffin.

But coffins are a luxury. So the dead are wrapped in hay

To shield them from gawpers as they are hurried to the grave.

Two-wheeled dead carts slither, grating snow-stippled lanes.

While snow flocks to gnarled wind-blasted branches,

And gales rack the slum of fields and gouged thatch,

Open graves tick time in Kilrush and Slievegrine.

The tongues of church bells know only a death-knell ring.

The clouds in the sky have turned to black stone.

The dead huddle like outcasts on a moon-paled sunless star.

The good and kind like Carbery who do their best are overwhelmed.

Every night moon skulls, sunken sockets, stick limbs stiffen in death.

The vacuous moon drags the sea night and day like a dog dragging gut. 

We follow the barefoot tramp of Vilna

How many boot linings did the Torah scrolls make?

How long did they have to dance round the burning scrolls,

Before pearly Vilna became Armageddon?

Before the boy who took the herring fell over?

No longer marbled in human memory,

Ash earth in a world of forests, flowers and stars,

How do you remember the murdered people?

Their blood mingled with ripe red forest apples.
The light of a thousand colours died in their eyes.

The stony sun did not burst into crystal shards.

A barefoot tramp grabbed the last tatters of sun

In the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

He helped to save Hertzl’s diary and Chagall.

He knew the winter snow would spring into green shoots.

Orphaned because you could not save your infant son,
You carried a hiker’s bag of grey sticky ash.

Like you Avram Sutzkever we must make witness.
Do more than climb the mountain of desolation.

Diane Arbus's Poetic Soul

Shooting the pastoral defaced by litter, she chased colourful comics

Blowing on the wind. Ran like mad to keep up with flying Dick Tracy.

She was Dick Tracy on the trail of the uncanny. When Amy stumbled

from the duck pond dripping grass and water she saw an angry inept mermaid.

Often, she was swamped sick with lethargic gloom. During convalescence

she felt a strange rage every night at 4am like a werewolf. How to make

the raw wild power into energy? She said she was like someone who puts vaseline

On her glasses to make it look more like what she normally saw with her slight defect in eyesight.

Eye to the keyhole waiting for the odd to shoot itself through the looking glass.

Hyped on clarity, discovering the real differences between things,

Flesh and material, densities, air water and the shiny. Looking hard for revelation.

Uneased. Guggenheim dizzied her with its small series of offices - judgment day in a bad dream;

Florida smelled bad like god cooking chicken soup in the sky. A nudist camp was like walking

Into an hallucination without being quite sure whose it was. She noticed that sometimes they feel

The impulse to slip into something more comfortable. It was as if God forgave Adam and Eve

And told them to stay in the garden and muck it up.

A magic mirror. She reflected back what anyone wanted to believe, like Atlas

Holding up a bubble and groaning. She reflected: Messiahs passing by across the street

In Washington Square living on the brink of a black pit; A human pincushion
and a headless man in a horror show that admitted babies free; a furry Rasputin

Who denied that Shakespeare wrote his plays or that Moses was a Jew and was like a seer

Who had forgotten his own secret; Max pretending to be Uncle Sam because he thinks people

Would like to think he is. She discovered a theatre of fictional beings looking for their stories.

She didn’t press the shutter, those images did.

Backstage at a circus with squinting spangled mothers spanking their squealing children

Or stuffing plastic milk bottles into their mouths while she bumped into an elephant

She realised the farther afield she strayed the more she went home. It was as if an arbitrary god

Had plonked her down in the wrong place with glee and what she had to search for
Was who she really ought to be. Her notebooks were the poetry of an artist who was always

answering to someone who wasn’t even asking.

Somme Interior

He was on the butcher’s block that July in Picardy.

The horizon drummed and quivered in a continual glow.

The German bombardment burst the earth into black trees.

He bumped into the sergeant carrying a piece of meat

On his right arm - the raw-pulp remains of his left arm.

He felt suddenly weightless through space in a rainbow sky.

When he came to, he saw Stan buried to his waist in earth;

From the waist down Stan was missing still facing the enemy,

His helmet tilted at a rakish angle on his wax face.

He crawled back to his lines like a whipped dog.

Days later he saw that the German wire had not been blown.

Some of his battalion hung lifeless in the wire,

the backs of their bloody heads bashed in like broken bowls.

He tried to shoot a surrendering German but missed.

He said nature tried to hide the slaughter in cottage gardens.

He was back to search for corpses in the pungent shitty mud,

He had carried men’s bones and maggots on a shovel

to common graves, from the green water in shell-holes

handled chalk-white slimy bodies that fell to pieces

in his hands as he searched them to find out who they were.

He said he never saw God’s hand on the grim Somme.

But along the parapets he saw purple thistles,

milky-juiced sow-thistle, mustard, the yellow spurs

of toadflax, button-flowered aromatic tansy,

pale purple willow-herb, scarlet poppy, cornflower,

and white ox-eye daisy. On the rusty barbed wire

Bindweed flourished, crimson ramblers, nasturtiums, and nests.

The trenches had hanging gardens of goosefoot, chicory,

nipplewort, grey-leaf fumitory, white-whorled woodruff,

goosegrass, sun-spurge, pimpernel, yellow-eyed forget-me-not.

Some of the soldiers coped by singing nerve-jangled songs.

“Do you want to find your sweetheart? I know where he is,

I know where he is, I know where he is. Do you want

to find your sweetheart? I know where he is. Hanging

on the frontline wire. We saw him, we saw him, hanging

on the frontline wire, hanging on the frontline wire.”

Dad scraped the snowy lather from his skin, hacking

Wiry white hair. The old soldier’s interior was still
an aftermath of war. Doesn’t lyrical Tagore remind us

the first flower that blossomed on this earth invited the unborn song!

Vesuvius blows its stack

When he spoke in his 60s of Dungarvan's Ormonde Cinema

he saw through the radiant eyes of an eight year old boy.

In the spiral of his memory Last Days of Pompeii summered on,

a Steve Reeves muscle-bulger swords-and-sandal peplum flick,

the mighty spectacle of a bacchanalian city getting pumiced by God.

The returned-home Roman legionnaire Glaucus saves the Christians before Pompeii turns to ash.

We’d agreed to watch his flick at the first night of our movie club.

See! The yawning jaws of the flesh-ripping alligator death pit!

See! The awesome eruption of Mt. Vesuvius as it avalanches down into a boiling inferno!

See! The martyred Christians thrown to the gaping fangs of crazed lions!

Pompeii! City of the pagan hordes, of revels and orgies, of spectacle and splendour,

the city that lived in sin and died in flame. Stuck in the drainpipe of his memory.

We climbed the fiery summit in a wash of Eastmancolour Supertotalscope.

He told us that Sergio Leone not Mario Bonnard was the true director of the movie.

We asked if this was his first encounter with the good, the bad and the ugly.

There is no doubt Mr Universe Steve Reeves was a sthenic hunk in a skirt and a sword,

especially when he grabbed the heroine off her runaway chariot and tossed her on his horse’s back.

He told us that Reeves had ripped his shoulder out for real when he’d hit a tree.

The movie arrived at the most exciting years-waited scene he wanted us to see.

Glaucus is thrown into a hidden pit of water and fights an alligator to the death. 

The hero unjaws the alligator in a far-too-short few-seconds battle where he has to move

a model from side to side to make it look like it's not a bendy flip-flop piece of rubber.

I saw it dawn on disenchanted him that this feeble wiggling scene was the image of heroic
bare-handed combat that had blazed for nearly sixty years at the centre of his memory map.

Now, having got the people out of town, Glaucus is down at the harbour.

The sea is on fire, so Glaucus leaps off the wharf, dives under the flaming sea,

swims underwater out to a waiting boat. He says that when Reeves did his first breast stroke,
his shoulder ripped again. He would have been burned if he'd come to the surface.

He boasted that Reeves had refused to take the lead in Leone’s spaghetti westerns.

And that he’d had the role of James Bond for the asking.

Looking like someone had spat on his dog, he pooh-poohed the notion that Opus Dei
had backed the movie and the martyring of the Christians.
He ignored the question whether the short skirts objectified Mr Universe’s muscle-honed body.

I reminded him that he had remembered Cheyenne knife-fighting in yellowish-red quicksand

when the entire series was actually shot in black-and-white.
He became the resident rowdy face-slapper at our film-theory fest.

Morning ....

Morning. The sun spills green on the gentle hill.

Unstoppable light dances on diamond waves,

The seeping glow is the sun swelling in a trance.

Then the sea breeze sings itself to easy sleep.

But his soul inside is a chamber of loneliness.

Time whispers through withering vines of absence.

The bitter nettle of separation stings his heart.

His soul’s collapse goes down into meaninglessness.

Wing-beats

The evening grows wing-beats like a crow.

The black it beats hangs on the farmhouse roof.

Birds fly to the wood, his last night in their throats.

The day drifts like a played-out fiddle tune.

He waits hard breaths for time to disappear him.

The mysteries of their moments flutter round the bed.

She remakes from head to toe the liveliness

Of the loved man her life curled up next to.

The small hours weigh his breath down like a stone.

His breath lightens as death drips on his face.

On the window mute flowers give cover to the room.

Cows outside with bent necks chew biscuits of hay.

The dawn creaks on the landing and the stairs.
He often said his cows smiled while chewing cud.

The forever where he sinks to is blind to the blue.
As the morning breeze sings itself to sleep,
He gives the wonder of his first breath back to her.

The soul’s collapse goes on until the emptiness

Becomes infinite at a point in its curved core.

Memories tuck away like bales in a barn.

The sun lemon-lights the fragrance of the flowers,

And time goes on with metal star indifference.

Mark and the Fox Stopped Time

It is before he goes to village Africa.

The night shines like bright particles of fine ash.

Darkness ghosts, so luminous beneath the trees.

A gasp of shape from the radiance becomes a fox,

Ballet-dancing skittishly as he chases stout white moths.

Mark sits down on the dew-glazed warm-breezed grass,

Offers a sweet to the fox who takes it, graciously.

The night vibrates like the sway of mud in a holed boat.

The moon dances on its burden boards, the clouds shiver

In the water. Mark and the fox in Boden Park

Find hosannaed space, a tree-planked suburban ark.

The fox's ease during their moon-blessed meeting,

Like the stick-stand of a heron or the tail twist of a trout,
Freeze-frames for eternity a sacred joyful moment.

David

Like the controls on a radio,

The weather fixed the day’s settings.

The ragged wind down the Liffey

Buffaloed the field’s longish grass,

Gagged the sliothair in the air,

Stitched spectators’ coats sideways.

First half, our hurleys took the brunt:

The wind gagged my side-line cut.

The bank-rooted trees panted hard.

Second half, we pucked eastward:

David beat them by a pocket of points.

The river hushed acres seaward.

Changing, we fumed about the ref.

The Saturday morning flicked ice.

We shivered like tree trunks in snow.

November tests your hurling faith.

David, his black hair like a crow,

Headed for the boats by the mill.

Nightlong, he was missing. Weeklong.

Ten days. A tulle of thin fog

Choked our hearts with a cold hand.

Along the hushed gleaming river

It veiled the weeds that held him.

Who used to laugh, Pass the effing ball.

On the bridge in Chapelizod,

In reveries of mist, a boy,

I watched in case David came

Down the weir in his wellingtons.

I did not want him to go down

To the sea where the sharks circled.

The evening’s shape is changing.

The trees rustle their leaf blessings.

Like flamingos on stilettos

Landed from an exotic lake,

Braving slippery Nassau Street,

Young women peer into boutique

Shop windows on Grafton Street,

Permeate the air with perfume

And the tease of silk and colour.

In the misted-over window

Their under-water faces smile

At a babble of bubbly boys.

David would have dazzled them bright

With ‘Howya girls!’ in his smile.

A violin silvers the yearning

Of a nightingale. And David

Deafens the guilt of memory,

This day, every November. 

Devonshire’s Causeway Bridge

He used to imagine that the stone of its hush-washed hump

Creaked in the estuary silence. In the night-ache of exile

Its single segmental arch had floated on his memory,

A string-coursed sandstone image, fading like a photograph.

St Patrick’s Day 1952

He has the hurt of having to leave Dungarvan to find work.

He dawdles before dawn on Devonshire’s bridge, like Adam.

Night-gloom turns to ash and burns away in a fire-funnel of sun.

The alchemy of dawn changes the grey to pouring-honey gold.

Spring is here, sliding off the Cruachain like a green shawl.

There is a lilt to the melody of the Colligan’s water flow,

As if it dreams of the ocean miles away past Helvick Head.

Or the hookers that hauled fish for salting on the quays,

Or four-oar rowing-boat races on St Augustine’s pattern day,

Or a grief of gull screams ghost-wailing after trim trawlers.

The air is frigid with the grey-sludge stench of cowhide tanning pits,

And the ghosts of famine paupers going blind on the quays.

Later, near the weigh station he watches the parade in Grattan Square.

The good-grace cheering, the rackety rumble of cars, lorries, tractors.

Jim Cooney in his pyjamas lies in a bed on Maloney’s lorry.

At the junction of Youghal Street his brother Anthony smiles.

St Patrick’s Day 2016

.

His sons tend their fat-fleshed cattle in Half Moon Bay.

The warm whispering breeze bids the green buds burst forth.

A lark tinkle-trills its scale above reed-grass in river-side fields.

The bay curves in tranquil depths to blue-green Pacific infinity.

Once again he is the shadowy silhouette on the hump-back bridge.

He has returned to the place of his dead fathers and kindred, like Jacob.

Between its flanking panelled piers he stands as the circle of sea

Seeps in and out of the bay laving and lapping the Cuinneagar.

In the county museum he found the mason’s language of the bridge:

Rusticated square-cut sandstone from Runcorn, panelled plinths,

Supporting lamps, squared soffits, and scrolled keystone.

He marvels at the green floodlit sheen of the cleaned bridge.

The harbour is a seashell magnifying the voices on the quays.

He watches a rising boat on a serene sandbar stir the light-mist air.

And the wind-rippled midnight waters light with dancing stars.

He knows the eye of the bridge was his eye to the world.

The Uncanny Art of Vulgar Things

Diane Arbus was a mink-stole princess living a fairy tale

Of silences and cold emptiness with the king and queen of ice,

She longed to leave the palace for an adventure in shantytown.

The mannequins in her father’s store sneered at her and over

The counter the sales staff bowed with bitter looks of resentment.

Father was absent with promotions to plan and women to pleasure.

Mother was depressed and stayed in bed, planning dinner with cook,

Smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, patting her face in a mirror.

Keeping up a false front was the tried-and-tested Nemerov way

Diane sensed a black ball of shadow haunting the plushiness.

She had no fairy godmother’s wand to magic her through her glooms.

So she turned her face into life’s slap, provoking the unreal world

Into clear Rollei squares of wild molten in her sideshow of freaks.

At a cost. The boy with a toy grenade in his hand was playing,

But she was primed to implode into the emptiness of her being.

Unlike her, the Backwards Man in his mac could see his past behind him.

She knew only what she wished for, a being not swamped by nothingness.

To be recognised. With hairy shirtless tattooed-torso, the glowing man

Strikes a fearless prize-fighter’s pose and seems to see her from his soul.

He doesn’t. She was forging documentary proof of her divided self.

Transgressive. It was as if an eyeless soul suddenly saw

Electricity. Touched wires. Lit up the darkness in the self.

The Wade twins wear the green dresses their mother made them.

She shoots them to embody the good and sinister sides of a single girl.

Trying to lick the roots of her being, she could not reckon reality.

There was a constant. She wanted to get into someone else’s skin.

In Revelations she is naked across a man’s lap looking

Like she is going to shed her aloneness in a bed merger of flesh.

She shape-shifted to get her way, to share the privacies of life.

Sex slimed its ooze into her shots as if she actually lived connection.

She was battling hard to preserve the stain of her existence.

But in Untitled the mentally disabled subjects do not see her,

Do not wish to share the secret of her secrets or her presence.

The truth is she was walking a tightrope stretched above the void waiting

For someone to scream; their silence was the scream that unbalanced her.

Her ferret ferocity had hunted freak-show faces to fantasticate.

Like as if a giddy young nun on her gleeful ministry, camera-wimpled,

Naughty in her private sin, transgressive, dared you to look away.

Her ‘freaks’ look as if they had a death riddle for her to divine.

Her camera shot her death in existence, her own pathology.

Yeats sweats near Hyde Bridge

Near Hyde Bridge

The drop-down rush of descending water under Hyde Bridge,

The falling line of an endless river nocturne, wakens

My room in The Glasshouse and gives me eyes for the rose dawn.

Ben Bulben is blurred as if seen through spring well water.

My cup of black coffee vapours steam above the Garravogue.

The hill lights above Thomas Connolly’s are bright like sunflowers.

They dim as the soft seep of pink first light wanders into town,

Like a tramp Chagall fiddler, reshaping fingery shadows.

A pearl-grey heron stands sacerdotal, stalking the ripples.

A vee swells from the frantic feet of a line of cheeping ducklings.

Pinions whispering, a grey flash of seagulls flaps and glides.

The Atlantic tang from a hundred-foot wave takes me walking.

The sun stipples pastels on the river wall on Markievicz Road.

Yesterday a Telford bus decanted tourists in macs there.

The wind whispers warm about the geraniums, hostas, and cosmos.

On New Bridge a reel sings as an oil-slick trout breaks water.

The furious fish fights for the slipstream of the shallow rapids.

Streaking from side to side, it shakes its head, throws the hook.

The grilse silver-grey river glides glassy under Hyde Bridge,

Rushes in a rapid flume of current swirls down rocky shelves,

Spins misty diamond-sparkle spray in a surge of dancing drops.

That same clerkly heron stands spear-billed on a damp flat grey rock,

His eyes clasping the still unsuspecting space above the channel,

Motionless, as he waits for prey to come within the kill-zone.

On Rockwood Parade a pale plaque remembers six soldiers

Who were shot there in a brothers’ war in July ’22.

Standing in circles of grey stone outside the Ulster Bank,

Like Harry Potter chanting the moongone night into day,

Yeats purrs a patter of poems through his dew-wet bronze suit.

I wonder if he sweats, A Terrible Beauty is Born.

Bare Icon

On two right feet, the bather’s big red hands

Fling his naked eye into unknown waters.

His mission is to paint colourless austerity.

Perhaps he’s had an excess in Shchukin’s house.

Malevich is a priestly prophet before the zero of form.

He says that art is not a necktie on a starched shirt.

Or a loaded camel bearing odalisques,

Sad sex slaves to the Sultan’s seraglio.

Delusion no question fires his hot act of painting.

The whiteness of the sugar his father refined,

Like the pure white winter fur of the stoat,

Has become a pure abstraction, an end in itself.

So Black Squares buries colours under blackness.

He consecrates it across the corner of the room,

As you would hang a devotional Russian icon.

Massless monochrome dissolves the colour spectrum.

He says White on White conquers the lining

Of the coloured sky, plucks the colours,

Puts them into a bag he’s made, and knots it tight.

He summons sight to the white free depths of infinity.

Blackness, whiteness pour into borderless squares.

These abstractions nullify the palette of flowers,

Promise a Kantian transcendentalism of colour

Without the embodied subject who is mauled by the now.

But his windowless art goes beyond the pure sensation

He invited the homeless vagrant in to find an opening to.

Today, you can see the sublimated colour planes

In Black Squares through the veins of craquelure.

In White on White, an off-white off-centre asymmetrical

Square seems to move in a borderless white field.

But traces of Malevich’s hand printed in the texture

Give the geometry the warm solo dance of human touch.

In his late figural work there is the sacral human face.

The soft sensitive grey eyes of his wife are true

To real life, as she walks in red, blue and white,

With her leather bag tucked under her right arm.

He signed the painting of his wife with a black square.

When Malevich realised he had inspirited pictorial art,

The clouds in Krasnaya Square were cream and honey.

In death’s abstraction the bare icon Black Square hangs above him. 

Goddess Wisdom

The morning on the mountain woke as a swirl of light.

There was no sun above the rim, no moon or stars

above the wordless woods, no flaming fire in the furze.

Yet the mystical light shaped itself into a moving mist

surging into Killary, returning the fjord to the void.

She said, Go back to the primal light on the first day;

On that first day God summoned a special ray of light,

not sunlight, not the light of the moon or stars.

The light was born by which all things were seen,

A special light, invisible, unknown to human eyes.

I asked her what she could see in the eerie mist.

She said she could see beyond to the source

before God stretched the heavens out like a curtain,

before flaming fire, angel winds, roiling seas, crop-crowned hills.

Ages before God drew a circle on the face of the deep.

Long before the sixth day when god created man,

God made wisdom, a female force, the first act of old,

Her divine pattern is the beginning of God’s work.

She is the way to knowledge, the source of ought that endures.

She was God’s daughter, the firstborn mother of everyone.

The mist strayed along the shore, searched empty famine fields.
This was for me like being born before word-shaped creation,

in the awesome state of absolutely nothing at all.

She said, Seek out mother wisdom, for without wisdom
nothing worthwhile ever takes shape. I was mystified.

Bumble Bee

A furry bumble bee scissors above the flowerbeds.

He skims, scurries, scrawls a fuzzy flight.

He bites through an inner flower-petal envelop,

Lured by the sun to lap nectar from a holed flower.

I see his wings vibrating like a fiddle string.

The April garden chills behind the high walls.

I see him next morning perched plump on a leaf.

When I stoop to look at him more closely,

He doesn’t move his frost-fastened hairy legs.

Frozen stiff before he could shiver warmth for flight,

Caught in the chill, he fell to the leaf lips of death.

In the evening, when the blaze of sun sinks, I sense

That the blast-furnace core of summer is heating up.

April waits for the cold to pass and summer to flourish.

But Icarus bee, 25 million years or more in the making,

Will never dance in fragrant sunlight warmth again.

I take no meaning from this - life is fickle. 

Living the weather

The long shaft of lane

Spears out to the harbour

To a pointed tip,

Silver like a bleached bone

Lit by the pearly moon

Whose lustrous light

Creates stars from

The rubbed-smooth stones.

The tide in the harbour

Hums a lipping moan;

Fog scuttles

On to the causeway

Like dancers to the floor.

The lamps of the tannery

Silver in seaspun mist

Bubbling on the glass.

The sea writhes

Against Davitt Quay,

Swells against Strandside,

Cries whale songs

Like a voice in a shell,

Tingles faces with salty spittle,

Warns moored boats

To live its moods.

Colours ferment,

Flow into a float of fog;

The town ages

Like a barnacled anchor;

The sea is the fog

Gloating behind my pane;

I live the weather,

Gulfed between gaff and green.

Elephant

If the numbers of particles and antiparticles were symmetrical

This world could not exist.

Antiparticles would, like poachers, annihilate the particles.

There’d be no elephants.

Luckily, so far, there are more elephants than poachers.

So your camera can shoot elephants like me.

That fact matters.

Because of the broken symmetries Nature was able to make you and me.

I’m not a cosmic freak.

I am a beauty, not in a dog-smuggler Johnny Depp symmetrical sort of way.

My head is awesome.

One dump of mine could fertilise a whole rose garden.

It is not funny being chased by stinging bees, having to run

Nearly as fast as neutrinos.

But perhaps it is funny when you think of the size of the bee

Chasing my massive ass,

Causing it to vibrate in ten dimensions in time and space.

I’ll explain my right ear another time.

Herd meet-ups are fun.

Water-blasting each other with our trunks is a real bond-builder.

Cooling in the surging heat,

We discover our hearts beating to the rhythm of the plains.

We honour our dead.

My own tusks are on the short side but they are mine.

There is no other way I could be; inescapably I am intrinsically valuable

From tip of trunk to tuft of tail.

To modify me without destroying the whole elephant me is impossible.

The squiggly tail on my ass is perfect.

There’s nothing good about an elephant family carved from ivory.
I don’t want to be just a tusked silk-screen on a cool schoolyard shirt.

ebb tide

At the ebb tide

moonlight smears

the whispering Colligan

along the tide mark

on Abbeyside strand

a woman walks alone

in the chill night

she drags her feet

snaring seaweed

rasping prickly cockles

leaving shards of shells
in the footveined sand

she’d given him a feed

of Ballinacourty spuds

before the trawler left

the strand is her hourglass

of worry as she waits

for sight of the boat

Shore Walk

In a fierce flair of mist 

      a foghorn aches its throat;

The wind-rasped air screams 

      through the quarrel of day,

Scrapes the tip-toed waves 

      Grazes the grey lug-wormed sand,

Brusque-blows tablecloths

      of dust off footpath tables;

A float of gulls flashes 

      white-silver in shock-stalled flight,

Chirping like strained cellos 

      exorcising bass sounds;

Jag-points of hail needle

      ruddy hands and faces;

Objects blur like newsprint 

      in the wrathful shower;

The stones of the wind wall 

      are stronger than our heads;

Our breaths are twisting stems
      freezing into the east;
As wind-rage spreads the day,
      we head home. Hands hinged;
we wrap our morning bodies 

      deeper in the cold wild
            of hot desire.

Crab Apple Tree

Hoar frost nips buttery daffodil coronas.

Slender blooms quiver yellow in otter water.

The fleece of the fat fretting foot-sure lambs is lank.

Finger-cold winter tries hard to snub fluffing spring.

The black yellow-eyed cat teases a tabby tom.

Nesting crows bend deadfall twigs to their beaks;

They caw harsh collective complaints at the furry flirts.

Mottled mackerel clouds crest unmown hill meadows.

Brush-hairs of sunlight varnish the tree barks with gold.

The oval ruffle-edged crab-apple leaves open,

Pointed to tip, fresh keen green upsides dappling stone.

A fringe-stirring wisp lifts milky-cheese undersides.

The buds surprise us with crimson and salmon pink.

White-pearl and yellow centres clamour for the eye.

Bees will buzz soon to full voluptuous flowers.

Branches promise scented summer pendulousness.

Autumn’s ripening will bring apple-wrestling robins.

The sun-bliss of lake sings Spring's soul-song to the sky.
Ripples rush through the reeds, restless with love's longing.
I am restless, like water on the feathering edge
of an oar or a boat on the rise of a turning tide.

out of

out of the damp ditch
souls of ash ghost up
their mist wraps us wet
under the blood sky
where pillars of fire
taunted the heavens
we holds hands
to feel flesh
aliveness

Balaam - Speaker's dummy

Balak of Moab hired Balaam, son of Beor, to blast the Israelites.

The soothsayer’s talking donkey shied from wronging the divinity.

And ran into a field.

God did not heed the soothsayer but alchemied the curses into blessings.

Poetic praises streamed like pure waters from gold and silver buckets.

Balaam wasn’t the spring.

So Balaam the buffoon predicted a victory star and blessed Jeshurun;

He sang of palm groves, riverside gardens, and cedars on watery banks;

He was a speaker’s dummy.

In the larynx of truth he was powerless to spill his plotted imprecations,

To harm the wandering people on their slow march to Canaan,
To do his dirty deal.

      I wish I had the gift to alchemise the throats
      of Balaam buffoons
      Whose hate speech and raging fists strike out
      to knock down worlds.

What will I do, Bagritskii?

What then will I do

at this late hour?

The tide teems

with sparkling lights.

I will gather

the silver and gold

into the hiker’s bag

of wind on my back.

I will tease in Yiddish words,

stretch like a sentence

on an eiderdown of letters.
And read Bagritskii.

Safe with Giora Romm

Are we just flies in winds of terror? No.

To be scattered like flying feathers? No.

You’ve read of stabbings on our streets? No.

You know they want the Jews to feel unhomed? No.

We’ve endured long between the lion’s bare teeth. No more.

Blood libel killed Bessarabian Jews. No more.

We’ve been brained and bloodied at heaven’s gate. No more.

We will not cower in sanctuaries of shame.

Ben Ami saw that salvation lies in strong arms. Yes.

We fling our fists in flights of steel, inscribe the sky

With the figure eight of our ace Giora Romm
above shimmering clouds silvering toward the moon.

Know: Our dead are never vainly dead without cause.
See the window lights shining like ripe golden wheat.
See the bride of Shabbat walk with her candle - safe.
See the land of Israel  blossoming like a rose.

Key

He had the key but not the lock to turn it in;

The bronze relic was a metaphor that opened

The lost alleyways of his Ashkenazic past.

As the mists of time bubbled raindrops on its skin,

It slipped free from the grip of ghetto memory.

When his mother, faithful treasurer, held it out,

He stretched out his hand and took it to his keeping.

She measured walks with a mind-map of courtyard locks.

She’d seen the letters take leave from the burning scroll,

Souls flying into the air, indestructible;

Her baby flung aside, black poison on his lips;

God summoning himself to grieve in a sackcloth.

The aleph stayed silent while the Germans murdered.

No temple plaque is vast enough to remember

Each murdered Jew, no high stone wall is long enough

To list their names, or their hope for regeneration.

Still

Once she brought herself,

gave herself to him.

He brought and gave himself

to her in love.

They sacrificed,

for love.

Beyond the violet rocks

bluish-purple bell-shaped waves 

blossomed on the beach.

The grapes on the vine 

smelled of ice-blue sea salt.

On this seamoaning slope 

the tipping cup of sun 

lipped amber from the gold. 

Thirsting for a slow sip 

of shimmering honey wine,

their souls slowed the seconds down.

Now they hide their faces

from each other.

They are exiles.

Their love is now

reduced to carbon black,

a burnt offering.

The altar they made

sheds icy tears

on their burning souls.

They missed the silent calls
the heart makes 
from the edge of the universe.
Still.

Love remembers

All flesh is grass.

So too is reason, passion and memory.

Poems and songs are like bright flowers that bloom in the field.

Grass withers.

Flowers fade when the chill of time blows upon them.

A wind passes by and they are no more.

The Tanakh tells us that steadfast love endures.

Even when the grass grows over the field of loss,

Love remembers,
From eternity to eternity.