New Poetry: Filiocht Nua

Abstract

DERRYNANE, 2005 It was well after seven, but how could we leave? It would have been like spitting in the face of God. A cormorant surfaced and dived, surfaced and dived, blue shadows lay down in the scuffled footprints, the long, glass waves curled over and broke into spatters of light. Yellow rattle, eyebright, bedstraw, sea holly, milkwort. Nobody there but us. We stayed on—the pale sand, the evening, the islands all turning smoke-blue and floating away— stayed as we'd done so often before, but might not again, the times being frailer, everything being frailer. Old ways fall away, the cormorant's wings beat black on the water, the world's going spinning off to God-knows-where. FLOOD Each time I pass there are more swans. A sedgey field at the best of times. And the little hills, circling. And the sag of the sky. A slow file of cows treads through a gap in the thorns under a blaze of white light that spills through a gap in the sky. [End Page 44] More swans, more water. The coil of their necks as they loop and they stretch, as they puddle the rushy pasture. Nine today—and the shine of the low, cold light on the stretch of the flood— nine in the wet, mossed grass. Each time I pass there is more water. More water, more swans. And cows, trudging up the green hill. And the big-bellied sky, great with rain. GALE FORECAST A hard wind raids from the sea. My mother's, a storm gull, blown over the strand, Her bones gone hollow and light and ready for flight. [End Page 45] COUNTRYMEN for Jim Barco We were sitting in the Abbey waiting, and he was telling me, low-voiced, about their week-old spaniel pups, the one with the tail that was two-thirds brown, white only near the tip. If he did it right, he said, if he cut for the flash, she'd be like the mother, her tail over-long, always bloody after hunting, ribboned by furze and briar— Ah, to hell with the theory, the theory and the purists. Blaze or no blaze, he'd cut her short. He'd not see her hurt like Jess. It was November, the old year was slipping, the new one drawing closer. There were monks drifting through, you could feel them—uncertain, pressed close to the walls and in the worn places— summoned to mark these eight hundred years of the Abbey's grey stones in the valley. He would do it himself? [End Page 46] He would, he said. A hot knife—fast—the heat sealing the cut flesh. His hands mimed the knife and the pup, I watched them. the swift, sure cut, against the dark wood, the monks drawing in for a better look. I thought of our pups— warm flesh-sacks, they'd jumped in my hands as the clippers closed, and of the small bloody heap on the vet's table. The monks were remembering the oddness of hands, smells, blood, you could feel them growing focused, denser, remembering the body's red roar and the past stretching back till it slid off the edge of time and the world, and always a dog and a man— through first light, through last light— a man and a dog moving always together. [End Page 47] SONG So, here comes Winter, crying her power and her glory, mocking at flesh, choosing bones for her bridal sheaf. Bones, and the old bell-sounds of the stag, Hunger, roaming about in the hills. Winter that thins out the light and thickens the dark and stills the running sound of water. Winter that is broken only and over and over by the dark speck, Seed, lodged at her heart. THE TURN That was the day he made Death go from him, though she was beautiful, crowned with white bones, her robe stuck with seed-pearls, dried petals of lilies, her...