Poetry

A Small Rain

I sit with Mick McGinn and watch the swallows Dipping till they nearly touch the roadway. He tells me the rain is sure to return. A heavy sky is holding the insects down. At evening, off the road to Annaghmakerrig, Two horses are running, their silk flanks shining, The pool they run by starred with…

The Falling

It rains and it keeps raining, and there is no sound except the sound of the rain falling, a sound with small silences in between, like music we can't understand, expecting each moment to be filled with something. The sound does not explain the trees, the yellow trees, whose leaves are falling like the rain,…

Olive

Between a rock and a hard place I lay down and let the sea do its worst. Waves trumpetted. Spray shot up in a whirlwind. Far from the tree I had fallen and like bladderwrack lay thinking only of you who knows what to do with love besides work it into flesh. The tide rode…

Blunt Trauma

.1 He stopped in for a beer on his way home from work. Shortly after his arrival two men armed with guns entered the bar. Whether they were out to get a cop or were primarily interested in robbery and figured what the hell they'd get a cop too, Whether the bartender gave him up…

Proof

You helped me stow these pages in a knapsack, Tossed me a blessing, “Do sit near the wings,” And I was airborne. Small hours of panic Now dissolved in birdsong, your look at parting Lights my work-desk under an Ulster roof. The book I gave you is dead manuscript, Say the grim instructions for reading…

April: First Movement

Intelligence moves me, I am moved by first movement as a soul is moved to enter body, as a star, possessed of mind, burns passionless for many lifetimes, as a tree does meditate continually, branches driven upward unceasingly by first movement, leaves driven to sing with fluent urgency of water, wind, and light, as I…

Portrait of an Aristocrat

A hanging fat rabbit leaks in the pantry, and the ants with rifles march to battle. Grapes in the still life go rotten. El Greco painted for the sixteenth century then, for a long time, for no one; now, in the twentieth, there's an El Greco again. Also sixteenth century, his hand on his hip,…

To Janey, Address Unknown

Wherever you are, the coast is tumbled stone, And there in the clearing is a white-tailed deer. Listening a moment to these words alone, Perhaps you will believe the silence here. This morning as I stand still on the lawn An owl halloos somewhere beyond the meadow, Beyond the boundary, and then is gone. The…