Words
i
By the stream in the mountains
There we found words
To nullify the hurt we’d done with words,
Bridging the space they made between us
Inching our way back by slow steps of instinct and reason
There are words hewn out from the origins of stones
Broken on the valley floor,
Ages old the gods still listen for
Consolation, lamentation, lacrimae
ii
Between an abyss and the blue sky
Fine as lightning, a crack opens up
Where the man of thoughts
Always hesitates, the dreamer always moves
We see only what we can admit
In the eternal discourse of Man and Myth
Here I scratch old words out of hard stone
With broken fingernails while another stands
Beside me and puts a feather in his hair
A simple act can bridge the worlds
Where eyes burning black
Distinguish darkness
From the deeper dark
iii
Below us the stream is not dumb
Speaking only the language of eternity
It is we who do not understand unless
Deep in the memory, something stirs
A solitary harebell is wide eyed,
Breathing in the world on the flood tide
Words were forged here out of fire
Long after imagination found dark caves
To ship the dead across the sea
And back again, returning endlessly
Reincarnation is only what the world offers us
Year by year by way of explanation
Making love between snow and snow
iv
Still the words with every utterance seem to
Separate us always by a hairsbreadth
From the ones we truly know
The things we really want to say like
Currents flow between us
As between coastlines where
Salt water floods the eyes
We pick out truth from lies
Words clothe the world
But always shroud the instinct
And still we work our passage home
The only way back, the only way in
As Adam named the beasts so they became,
It’s the naming makes things real-
A gift for angels
What the angels want?
A handful of hazel nuts
Or the feeling of wet berries after rain that stain
Inky fingers, a nettles sting
All more potent than a prayer, these being precious things
A messenger calls, a dream unfolds
And we return with all
We have contrived to be of worth
Simple gifts, clay, corn, earth and
A brief song forged in work
Between our deaths we come to make
Our own annunciation
Black Sun For Paul Celan
i
Black sun rise, black water,
Dawns cold light
I knew Celan had died
By his own hand
Before I’d read a word
Of Margarete or Sulamith
ii
Oh Poor Celan,
Scrape music from your violin,
Play up!
Even as death walks in and all about you laugh
We are too late for the gods
And too soon for being
Verfremdung;
iii
Such strangeness,
How the artist holds us
His face haunted
Hard against the fire
Of our small anxieties,
Traversing worlds, he dances
Sees all things mythically;
iv
Outside Eden men will always fight
Out among the third day mountains
Tight between Picasso
And the Tomb of Holbein’s Christ-
Christ if he were right
And we are all forsaken?
To make us aware of our destitution
Is that what the artist does?
Fintan
i
Fintan Mac Bochra,
Sits alone in his chair
Where the paint chipped door remains
Forever unlatched
To welcome those who find him there
A stranger in their dreams
ii
A slow, low embered fire
Lives in ash in the hearth
Where a small flame tongues
Words in ancient Gaelic, borne
Out of the double mystery
That comes with the incantation
Of fire and burning roots
The mystery of root
The mystery of fire
Entwined forever
Travelling way down…..
iii
Motionless in the smoky downdraught
He asks those that enter for a feather
They do not possess
But never the matter
The body is warmed,
The psyche hovers peregrine
The man was a salmon once
When his wife and children died
Became an eagle
And a white hawk too
Changing the way light will
In a blowy autumn wood
iv
Beyond the stream on the lake that was a mist
A swan glides into the form of a girl
With auburn hair curling to her hips
She has eyes that will turn a man to stone
He cannot name her,
Banbha, Fodhla, Eire.
No incantation would save him from her kiss
You have made me cold with neglect She said
Leaving him stone dead, departing with a hiss
a different drum 