Poetry

for L. I can almost see the prairie where you are— the flowering grasses and the cones of white blossoms on the horse chestnut trees. The horizon calms you after months of cities. I imagine your eyes seek that line as if you had cast it out over water. A few nights ago, I saw…

     Spain frightened you. Spain where I felt at home. The blood-raw light, The oiled anchovy faces, the African Black edges to everything, frightened you. Your schooling had somehow omitted Spain. The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum. You did not know the language, your soul was empty Of the signs, and the welding light…

Sally, I was happy with you. Yet a dirty cafeteria in a railway station — In the hour before dawn over a formica table Confetti’ed with cigarette ash and coffee stains — Was all we ever knew of a home together. “Give me a child and let me go”: “Give me a child and let…

It is not true what they say about the body: that it must be loved, that it cannot sleep through its nights alone without injury. Look at me. Look at the way the artist lies about his loneliness, painting a room where walls, floor, and ceiling converge on a door too small for me to…

Dragonflower. Ice-flame fontanelle plume Of the Virgin — The spine coarsening on upwards The leaves centipede and sinister For swarming up the body For stiffening out the gorged soul Ribs Fish and perfunctory To lift the flared cheekbones, the mouthings Of the hydra-face. Core-abstract Shameless and craving Of cunt-flesh — The splitting grin and the…

Grandmother is all bleak and bare While the alien whom I do not know Fattens golden on the cliffedge. Yet although our bones rot more rotten than we know Or than we care to know; Although we find God’s throne but not God; And although we are all in our blueblack way Bleaker and barer…

I do not believe the ancients— the constellations look like nothing at all. See how their light scatters itself across the sky, not bright enough to guide us anywhere? And the avenue of trees, leaking their dark inks, are shapes I can’t identify. The night is too inconstant, a constant injury, alchemical moonlight changing my…

Snaps its twig-tether — mounts — Free Dream-yanked up into vacuum Wings snickering. Another, in a shatter, hurls dodging away up. They career through tree-mazes Nearly uncontrollable love-weights. And now Temple-dancers, possessed, and steered By solemn powers Through insane stately convulsions. Porpoises Of dove-lust and blood-splendour With arcs And plungings, and spray-slow explosions. Now violently…

Sweeney Astray is a version of the Middle Irish tale, Buile Shuibhne, in which Sweeney, king of a small kingdom in north east Ulster, is cursed by a saint and transformed into a bird at the Battle of Moira. The bulk of the story is concerned with his subse quent life of frightened wandering and…