Too many moons
for Jack Gilbert who went further
Too many moons in his poems, he said they said.
Too much sky. But what if he had lived on islands
under the sun with fishermen. What if he had heard
silence sounding in the water. What if there were no words.
What if to him a southern moon stared
At infinity in that night light
And held the chaos of lovers.
how to say what
Words are the clothes thoughts wear.
Samuel Beckett
To say nothing the same.
In the space. To repeat nothing, And everything.
Put it there over the moon with the heart outside.
When you. And it’s all read/red. Granny Smith is gone.
Took a kind of a powder. If I only were in a dark
of my own making. Making out fireflies touch things sticky.
Do tell how to say what: do Prague lights shine spatial
hollows in Slavic moonlight when nothing says
anything any more. More than more. Two is not one.again.
Grasshoppers have thin legs and I want to go home. For Christmas
in a dark of my own making without silent night. To say nothing
the same. When you. If I were only in a dark of my own. Making.
To Say Thinking
It was at first as though no one.
It was as though there was no hearing
at the table where no one listened.
It was as though her sound
was too quiet.
All her speaking tactile in that bed
shining like that white lamb on the wall.
All the talking behind the sky moments.
To have a say beyond the clutter of talk.
Far behind the anonymous stars in their spin she reached.
She had to learn all without teaching
something of her own,
a language to say it in. A wild mind
where everything mattered: stars and lambs and silhouettes.
She was by herself in that thin bed wheezing
and taking it all in.”Deep,” Wyman said you were.
Deep. Maybe one of those grown-in-the-wild miracles in a jungle
fluent in her own making.
Ever since Rinny found the words to speak public,
they rolled out of her faster than she could ever say them to know.
Her voice seemed to sound a ways,
low like crickets in a run of drifting.
Ever since, she forgot how to speak
word by word. Out-speech became an eruption, a geyser
to burst surfaces. Not to think to say,
But to say thinking. To light the lamb.
To shine herself. Out-speech was a close seam
Without basting. A fitting tight in a crystal fog
Writing in Place
It’s about weighing things,
It’s about equals,
like to like, peach to peach,
swimming out loud in the ocean
and floating even in the tides
It’s about writing in place
like fitting right into your skin,
heart speech in morning sleep,
writing word for word on the air.
It’s like exactly.
Blue cats in the clouds.
It’s like nothing extra
the orange white under the rind there,
that long-clean sweet and fresh,
or Samuel Beckett unwording
the world playing his flute magical.
It’s about holding some rhythm
in a groove, sharps folding into flat
at last Etta James and life is all in the song
like Leslie Howard dancing his elegant face
and Humphrey Bogart gliding through his silhouettes.
It’s about writing in place,
here where here is,
this balance, ripe sweet corn cobbing,
wild geese gandering
This sheer sun light
when somehow
you can be as never before
standing out still with yourself
writing in your place
beyond all the words and kissing the sky.
Shore-Lines in the Sand
Why would I want to write about flat fields
And bright color, to suggest limits and consequence
Why would I want to make pictures
As though I were an artist copying the wind
As though things could be anything
As though there could be shore lines in the sand
As though Camus could ever live without light
As though Cezanne would not paint his canvas thicker and thicker
As though birds lead photographable lives on their perches
Bobbing up on demand to entertain white-faced children
When, backstage, birds beak their worlds bloody
Batter and rush the air in hypnotic trance.
Life is no transparent stillness
with the hollow grace of imaginary holiday.
The forces of flat tussle with the agitations of circumstance.
I want my poems to touch that surge,
that place where blood first moves into sleep,
where heart spears memory as it gropes into time.
I want the crash of titans, life in the round,
to be in the brunt of it,
inside the thunder before the storms,
I want to sustain the bang in the beginning.
Hot headed and sure fired,
poems spin far from flat fields,
to hover inside time and knowing
with the blinding precision of dreams.
In Spain
when
in Spain, then, police crowd
us and we grow smaller as
night smoke packs us in pieces of old innocence-
an unfamiliar fear greases
our childhood with fascist sparks and guns,
power’s black hats that shine darkly.
Doris Lessing said I was a child of violence
Doris Lessing said I was a child
of violence but I wear peace under
my arms are gentle and Burl Ives is
singing foggy dew too. Does violence begin
when you hear of tied ropes & peeling skin
& do our blood cells clamber for violence
are they doomed for ever after?
somehow soft skin sings a melody with itself
and Hiroshima Dachau Dresden
Buchenwald Flossenberg Belzac
I play the marimba with sweet memories are made of this. |
Mary O’Connell has had poems published in Southword , Best of Irish Poetry 2008, and the Café Review, (Portland ME). She taught languages and English and now lives in Cork city. She also had some success reciting her work in Strokestown and Derry. She has been fortunate to have been mentored by Paddy Galvin and Greg O’Donoghue in a workshop at the Munster Literature Centre, and often writes about nature and classical mythology, as well as taking an ironic look at public figures and events. A regular at O Bhéal, she has twice been asked to read for visiting American students.
