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