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  • Filíocht Nua:New Poetry
  • Patrick Deeley

Crow Conversations

The grey-skinned quartzite cone of the Sugar Loaf,crows flying over, lifting towards us, flappingin their twos and threes at first, thickening then to scores,multitudes deepening the darkness that bringsthem about. There's money in rookeries, an old voiceoffers,money and luck. I grew within earshotof crow-haunts,my dawn and my dusk crow-capped.I saw the starveling despatched by its parents,and a parliament convened around the diseased,to kill it. No use in nature for weak or witheredunless to feed off, stubby maggots making the carcassmove. Still we fall over and over in lovewith "mother" nature, the "good" earth, "innocence"of birds and beasts, wax lyrical in spite of all we knowof the ravening behind everything—it preys on us, too,it scavenges—but now again the flight of crowsover the Sugar Loaf to take their rest recallsfor me far rookeries girded up out of great horse chestnutand beech trees that stand for home, first home,crow conversations become the earth speaking in riddlesthat stay unfathomed no matter how intently I listen. [End Page 36]

Maquette

Heavy-headed and holding to a foetal curl,your man of sculptor's clay, driedin the sun where he's been left entirely forgotten,has taken also his share of rainon board, and wept his burnt-sienna colour

down the windowsill, wept a great slow splashof himself over the pebble dash—until now, sundering and moulderingin the little net-wire cradle thatcontains him, he stirs in us feelings of pathos

we might prefer to do without. A flowerin its pot, standing near,melts backafter its fashion to a green slime, a primordialsoup, with suggestion of some freshnew thing to come. And in the scummy water

of a sprinkler can, tiny creatureswriggle through summer's fester, ascending finallyto the surface, fledged for take-off.But still my eye goes back to this maquette,finding him peculiarly compatible. His bulbous

skull, the vulnerable, buttony slopeof his neck, the rib-cage resembling a ruptured basket,the rounded elbows, kneecaps arcingloose, the knuckles and tarsalsbegun to flute and crumble outward—is he

an effigy of the skeleton we foundin a disused quarry years ago, whispers of dustsifting in and about, and what foul playstill buried? Or maybe he standsfor the boy who kicked a ball along the Liffey [End Page 37]

one time it had frozen over, one time when fireswere lit on the ice—was it 1338,or earlier, or later? Truth is, each visithe represents the first thing that comes into my head.I make-believe he has known small

sensate grandeurs, advance of mossall down his chest and groin, lichen's cosmetic gloss,the silken strings of a diadem spider's webglistening where they rise about himuntil it seems he is hoisting a shield or a trophy

up from his ankles and knees, pasthis elbows, to the point of his chin. And known,even as he sags and deteriorates, theatricsof wild weather, brilliant burstsof birdsong that haunt our living,moonshine

and starlight and the crimson glowof the city sky provoking us to wonder late at night.I allow he's shared your hand's touch,in his rawness resisted this,muchas I still resist the shape you make of me.

And accept, as he disintegrates, imagesof mourning he calls to thought—the refugeefrom war, child of famine, victimof contagion that is eventually all our human lot,the dead one sent down the river in a boat. [End Page 38]

Cloistered Old Man

The bronze head had its earto the ground in the Kloster zu Allerheiligen,starry weeds were creepingover it, and wasps rummaged fiercely

amid the fragrant petals,but the holes and tubular foldsof the iron eyes and mouth and lipsappeared to me a padlock

for the earth, and the flat pipeof the nose I imagineda key to a labyrinth where everything...

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