I am going down. and in..,
A crack in the ceiling above our bed provides the egress.
I must retrieve my shield.
~
The goddess is an anchoress.
Her sisters, her sisters are furies.
~
One and two, there are three
They have white hands,
~
That are unused.
Blind eyes.
They unpick the stitches.
Loose the threads.
~
The dress has sweetened in the four winds,
Nethertheless it carries a loam load.
Its grains are wet between my fingers,
It has absorbed something of
~
But this is where I want to go.
I am going down and in :
To sing and sing.
~
I will probably rewrite this, based as it is in a Triptych or trilogy
of images that circled round a dying; and in a number of books
that had provided reading matter in the bleak winter days of that
time when mostly I was in Mayo. The dress in question was
charcoal jersey with a cowl neck , it was the dead of winter
in the aftermath (indeed during ) the Aceh tsunami. I have spoken
of it before in this blog. The dress in itself felt as sodden and
as grainy after the funeral and became a part of a descent/
initiation process that accompanied the dying and the death.
The other two dresses that form the trytich (for that is what
it is) are the Wedding Dress and the Ragbag. These poems
are about images and are loosely woven, badly remembered
and often not returned to…
