Chapters of Age
Stone landscapes of Inishmore and Burren, May 2010
Chapters of age: increasing anxiety
histories beyond credence
massive stone forts in mist.
Loss of secure equilibrium in darkness
with tension headache
the massive lintel.
Ruins of small monastic settlements
dull pain to right of middle back
faery cackle from stone heaps.
Use of walking stick to lessen this pain
inclined to the side of the road
again those dim stones.
•
In Carna they sang as nowhere else
and I did sing, at least once I did
nobody held my hand.
“I kissed my love by the factory wall”
did I?
liability to mental paralysis when challenged.
And sing still and louder sing:
psalmic impulsions rolling over the moor
seeking an imperfect cadence.
•
A man lives in a kind of box in the garden
where is the musician or architect
who built me this weary smile?
The blue and white teacloth,
ensign of a domestic contract
and all the world is grey.
Whence this worry in the evening,
that the young of earth might wreck everything
when what they do is fall over
Singing “Dirty old town”. Outside
the windows and five fields further on
the stone tractates become legal.
•
Thousands of gentians (spring, 5-petal)
and mountain avens
in the cracks of limestone pavements.
A line between shadow and light
full of bone and flint
full of flint and bone.
Lines across the earth, head
looks at foot, foot steps across
gaps in stone where gentians grow.
O God I used to have such a pure foot
you couldn’t see a single vein on it
how our forms rush to the gate.
How matter obstruct us
and yet forms
the delicate street at night.
•
Thatched cottage capitulating to damp
the chair outside the door
where he used to sit
Facing south across the chevaux-de-frise
remembering blood on snow, Lord,
keep us from mystery and impotent rage.
Saw everything from there, the rich
and the poor, the cloud descending,
the cattle driven over the cliff.
•
Bleak godforsaken peninsula becomes
bleak godforsaken transport development
earthly tides come and go.
Viewing the guillemots and puffins my how
it lurches and swells in 1954 my mother, poor thing,
had to get the bus back to Llandudno.
A quarter mile walk to a locked gents
the coast too is all rock and gap
and here comes the inspector hopping.
“What are all those fuzzy looking things out there?”
trees, clouds, stones, floaters,
little bright-eyes calling me.
•
These lonely towers falling to ruin
the rook flies straight in the window
causing eructations.
Law school in a stone ring “Old age is either
wholly centralised or the centre atrophies”
centrifugal dehydration system.
Megalithic tombs surmounting the thin fields
that run off into the distance harbouring
old men who ran away with babies.
“Over a thousand years later a newly-born baby
was buried in front of the portal”
loss of short-term memory.
Finding the way to the bathroom
in the middle of the night half asleep
strange shadow, shed door ajar again.
•
Baby curled up very small in the centre
two men doing a fiddle combat
memories of unbearable histories.
Famine and persecution
fighters disguised as priests or violinists
on the night path over the hill
With nothing said, only the wind in the hazel bushes
that are eating up the open land, tossing
back and forth over the graves of heroes.
The chapel in the woods
and the wide routes thereto across the open pastures
and poor little Jimmy Murphy under the grassy bank.
•
And many another, as plentiful as the stars
and stones underfoot, of which at least two will be
raised and carefully placed at the limits of our science.
Dig my grave both wide and deep a marble stone
at my head and feet and to my chest there comes
a turtle dove to tell the world I died for love.
Tell me something else, tell me the source and extent
of this silence, not in the grave but in the homes and
parliaments of the world, and in immemorial stones.
“This awful silence that emanates from me, standing there
trying to remember what real people would say
in the circumstances” head stone foot stone cumulus.
Head stone foot stone cumulus, the day
is ended and lost, nobody said anything to relieve misfortune
the day is destroyed.
Unbaptised children set in separate graveyards
mere bits of walled-off moor with neither head nor
foot stones but massive cumulus.
Head guides foot the route home
all I asked was a legal answer
a ring under cumulus.
•
What then is the lesson of the stone tractates, what
is the tune they sing back to us after all our naming?
“A Labouring Man” and his fear.
The questions flying at us every day
what is the plant with dark green leaves and
tiny white flowers? What is the answer to fear?
For there are answers to fear,
common or garden
that singing up the coast.
Entire sentences are quoted from:
Tarjei Vesaas, The Birds and The Boat in the Evening,
William Carlos Williams,
the on-site information board at Poulnabrone,
one forgotten source (“Old age...”),
“A Soldier’s Life”
and two Irish songs.