three poems

Grave

Beside the putrefying canal,

the church is an argosy of souls

paying dues for consolation.

The graveyard extends east, west, north and south.

Against the sun, black silhouettes

instantly flourish into cold mourners.

A Boeing does not cut the silence.

The calm stone wall stands, an open frontier,

parallel to the canal.

We watch the coffin sink into the open earth.

Then the hole of light is filled with dark.

And the east wind hauls the baggage of the dead.

Pink-legged starlings bustle to their reedy roosts.

The hieroglyphs of the water hen’s feet

spell life-affirming energy.

Does my grandmother see this happen?

Does she read my mind?

Does she hear the talk of wills?

Later when the windows burn like lamps

her black windows reflect the moon.

Wish I could take up her grave

And walk the whaleback hills with her,

walking stick working one more time.

She spent her nursing life defying death.

Floating

The fields look up through a film of dew.

The house broods on its stony stand.

Windows toss out gold.

My mind is a measuring device

struggling to make sense of space.

The sun is in the lane.

The rumble of a tractor ploughing

is framed in my open window.

In the trees starlings mimic crows.

The grass and hedges smell wet green.

Apples prove gravity.

Breakfast smells send shoots

through the floor like invisible vines.

I am horizontal in a bed that floats.

There is a fiddler on my roof.

Autumn is big-bellied.

The year grows old.

I am a cyclops’s eye.

Sailing on the surface

Summer mirror-glasses

the skin of the sea.

Quicksilvers the dimpling

deepening before the sailboats.

A gentle westerly blows

billowing dream-coat sails.

Around the buoy

The boats are a small fleet

working fast together.

In the harbour we see

Each team dreeing

their own destiny.

Hard-knock blues

in the smokeless liquor haze

his balalaika strings

torment the air

with pain

his fingers wander

the memory tracks

the chord-filled lines

where he is lonely

as the poet

Osip Mandelstam

the ice jug on the bar

looks cold as a turnkey’s heart

now a picolo player trifles

with his bluesy rhythm

a woman whips up the will

to dance holy carnal steps

a lovely gift

to hungry hearts

I see the man is worn-out

but he is not ready yet

to hand his Adam’s dust

back to the clay

now the woman shakes her soul

to his convulsing strings,

opens her generous heart

smoothes her waist and hips

to the rhythm and grace-notes

of his finger tips

she knows he seeks comfort

that in heartbeats of time

he cries from his soul

the pulse of lost love

it shows in the veins

of his taut-stringed neck

grabbing for a branch

in the deep dark well

he knows we all drown

but he licks sweet honey

from the leaves of his tune

on his way down

the hard-knock blues lament

Maya Plisetskaya

Through a brass lamp lit window on a tv screen

I see Maya Plisetskaya, at 50 years, muscles lean,

animate the stage, her arms and legs insist

while woodwinds and brass resist

Easing the tension. And she gives us the chance

To see the dancer become the dance;

I am rapt before her blazing soul in motion;

She becomes the bolero, like an insistent ocean,

like the petals of roses on the dunes in a breeze,

like the waving fruit of branches on swaying trees;

She makes me light like butterflies in a sunny grove

or the airy laughter of brave surfers in a cove.

I want her to dance till the barley waves at the sky

till the swallows swoop with sunny joy,

till the lions and tigers all grow tame,

till she moves so fast she forgets her name.

Like a spirit, the wind dances the dust on the street;

But I have never see a spirit with her dancing feet.

Like a white sail-boat cutting the ebb-and-flow,

Like the foam on the silver edge of the lake below,

Like the beat of the tide on the arc of the shore,

Like the rhythm of my heart asking for more.

Through a glass darkly I see this strong woman

who faced down Stalin for the sake of the human. 

wedge tomb

Sun shafts from the south redden the stony solitude;

The strong septal stone and standing double walls warm;

The wide stone roof is the flat kathedra of time;

The cairn stones now compose the wind-sung enclosure.

To its grass-blade tips, this green field is soul unseen.

The tomb skirts the radiant impenetrable,

A higher meaning permeating the cosmos,

Beyond nature’s fundamental physical laws;

It does not require a god’s certified existence

For a look of wonder to earth epiphany.

Intrinsic value has no periodic chart;

It throbs, like love, in our impulsive eagerness

To be enchanted by stones, stars, space and meaning;

The sublime soaks stony lanes and the Milky Way,

Inescapable awe imbues our star-waste being.

We take the wonder to be objective and real;

In the mud-script of an ancient field read aright,

We return to the mud what we take from the mud;

We recite the poetics of stone to affirm our faith in value,

Renew a seasonal covenant with the gods of meaning.

Here souls sense something deeply moving, yes, numinous,

Belonging to a world that inspires devotion;

It matters utterly that human life goes well,

No matter the mystery that defies account

or the inexhaustible depth of a wedge tomb.

Sunset is a solemn moment of a time past, a time new;

It is not a sure sign of a singular creed;

It is when pilgrims listen to the roadside tales of others;

Voices find solid tone and connection where stone walls whisper;

Where horned sheep straggle shared stories make vulgar gospel.

Women march

The French polisher van has a message:

‘Wood has life; we give it soul’;

Jesus on the bumper of a blue Allegra

Turns right through a no-right-turn sign;

God moves in mysterious ways!

Televisions flicker Trump's inauguration;

On the frozen streets women 

protest patriarchy, chant 'equality now'.

A sign in an apartment window warns:

‘Keep your rosaries off our ovaries.’

Poem fest

 Like a priest monk he chants his poem in formal tones,

while flicking tongues of flame lick the sooty fire-bricks.

The dappled women sit closer to the turf fire

bathing in its golden arrowy tabernacle rays.

He checks to see they shine in the palm of his hands.

He confesses to them in a proud penitential voice

that he is in the filmic poem visually.

He says the spoken words sound wayward in his larynx,

that his mind finds its feet only on the floating page.

They seem to understand if their faces tell.

He announces that they’ve been to a kind of karaoke,

and salutes them for colluding in the pretence

that he is me-the-poet and worth listening to.

His finish is a second of self-extinction.

To one couple his thank you is in vain;

They have stepped in for shelter from the rain.

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.