Ears & Eyes (and Footholds & Handholds)

Saw this as I drove into the Alexandra Quay dock to see what was doing. I was on my way home from a short interview with John Haughton for Near FM in Coolock. He didn't seem to have any precise questions in mind, though he had a theme for the series of interviews: 'New Perspectives on Irish History: Dreams Themes Myth and Ecology.' So I began by reading some of my poems which might bob happily along that stream, such as these short sequences from my last two collections:


Footholds

Somewhere down there, underfoot,
there are oak woods stuffy with silence
and air-brushed with its variations: hisses, creaks,
cricks, whiffles, rustles, a flurry of a sighs...
the whole island detached, nestling, adrift
and at home in its own sea.
A solitary cuckoo, then a blackbird’s bright-yellow whistle
illuminates the air. No one has a hand in this
nature, rust-dark, sap-green, accumulating
wing upon wing, fan upon fan, a map
of smells for the pygmy shrew. Everything
tickles itself with its own brilliance, weighs
in with the same gravity. Warming mountains. Cloud-
shadows broader than mountains. A beetle
flashing its shield. Sticks. Stones.
Babel-towers
of untoppled, sky-scraping shhh.

*

Something has struck, the faint muffled thock
of stone on bark. A new time. A new clock.

*

On calm days we take stock, thank the old flatfaced sea
for pretending to sleep sound. Inland the woods thicken
with inquisitorial shadows. Out of nowhere the sky
slams shut a black trapdoor. Something is loose
up there. Boulders as big as the world roll
over the world. Lightning violates the air
indelibly. Then up comes the next day’s ache
of fathomless blue, bog-cotton clouds. No need
for the written word. Above our heads the gods
we’ve found names for mingle with those we don’t know.
The soft-headed mountains speak.

(from THE SKY ROAD, Salmon, 2007)

Handholds

1.

Spiral. We set it down where we can, a ripple
on tombs, brooches, stones, the pattern of holes
in a soup-strainer. Sacred and inscrutable, the line
has got under our skin. The scrolled-up symbol, awake,
begins to uncoil.

*
Though we’ve housed them soundly, the dead,
their voices reach us, restlessness
of wind grass tree cloud – words
on the tips of their tongues.

*

Safe in the firelit night.
Safe in the sunlit wood.
Safe as a well-fenced field.
Safe as our guarded cattle.
Safe as a crannog, a ring-fort.

Still, sometimes we tremble
like a wind-blown nest in the bramble.



2.

New geometry everywhere now.
The worldly raindrop, cloud-cliffs,
night and day are designed
by a different architect.
The chorus of old names has sunk
to the dark at the heart of a daisy,
or they loiter by the old wells, stand
like shadows behind each grassblade.
They have only stepped back a little,
out of the sphere of this bright new
magic with its hard-edged symbols,
the sun + moon spiked by a cross.
Silent men sit in the woods,
not working but busy, their quill-tips
blackened with holly-juice, beetling
*****************************
as if the sweet breeze from a blackbird
should fit into laddery lines,
as if you could thread the wind,
as if this god could be tugged out
with a jewelled chain of capital letters...


*

See, in the valleys at dusk,
pockets of glimmers, licks
of candle-light at a window.
Dreamy as the drift of sparks
that catches, for a few seconds,
in the black throat of a chimney.
A sprinkle of quick bright names
settling, or flaring like gorse
blackening into the roots
of an old song.

*

Now we hear it, the voice of money
making its own rosary,
fish-eyed, splash-headed kings,
dud bells, a trickle of clinks,
metal talking to metal.


3.

Boats broaden, sewers
add their tongues
to the black pool,
reflections climb into glass

*

Then, they are moving the furniture
again, rifling under

the road’s carpet: not there.
area railings, fanlights, the blotched greys
in the old photographs –

a whinny, a cough, silence that gently flicked
its carthorse ears into the 1960s

and on: dandelioned yards dragged out
like untidy drawers, ransacked –

flameshadowed brick, a child rolling a tyre
as big as herself to the bonfire –

wallpapered gaps, a fireplace, a shirt on a chair –

a city half-dressed in a rush
patting its disappeared pockets.


*

Below the medieval church tower
the graveyard now a playground squeals
and shrieks. The steel tube slide
flashes a welt of sun.
Disciplined, displaced stones
line the walls. There is nowhere
left to lean.


*

There: the voices thrown
from Thingmote’s mound

Here: moved earth, the grind
of gears on Nassau Street

There: what netted the names
in the map’s blood vessels

Here: names to be given:
Skateboard Alley, Fr. Noise Quay,
Out Of Our Heads Walk

There: footholds, the splash of feet
on the hurdle ford

Here: old ladders in a skip,
new holds, rungs in the air



There: Pale walls, the beerbarrel
clatter of weaponry

Here: a soiled pink blanket
in a doorway, a nation at the gates,
real estate


4.

River your fine silts
alluvial alphabets known
to brewers, gulls, mullet
river splitting the grey
ice age, its flashy
bracelets of traffic,
river strung with bridges,
intravenous river gone
under the skin with rain’s
needling voices, river now
as then, speaking the glacial
unfinished sentence

*

flutter of war plague fire
where fingers of forest
oak groves, bare-headed hills
in the before-dawn blue –
a shudder of wind in the leaves
maps breathing and rustling
whitefire gulls in the squares
tongues in the old bells bonging
smell of piss in an alley
cranes turning like weathercocks
turfsmoke blown across
bricky and glassy centuries
corners gateways laneways
backstreets of the sea