Filiocht Nua: New Poetry

Occam's Rime

The philosophical effort to say matter in terms of spirit,
or spirit in terms of matter, to make final unity.

FROST

All Ireland under hoarfrost and blue skies
Swept in, as it seemed, on a djinn's carpet of Arctic air
Out of Ireland, or a birch-besom from Russia; ice-chandeliers of hoary

Gray riming a grand glitter of beeches
At Stranmillis, every spray and bough and bush
Is hung for a time

In crystalline dew, one morning's
Hour in aspic, a gnat's Jurrassic spirit-speck
Outwith the amber fog of expanding light, vanishing matter.

 

Eels

Ten-Twenty. Tideway switchback was hesitating. Little whorls
And whirlpools chopped and peaked in the churnings
Of slicks and rapids and upsurges and slides and springing magmas

Exhausting Leonardo's inventory. Marvelous to think
Something as grand as the Moon did this. And if
It was true here, in something so small as a glistening

Shoal of sun-scales, was it not true of everything
Everywhere? The yellowy butterfly that had paused in the bow
Of my canoe? The silvery school of flying fry

Arcing through the surface as if a leap into consciousness
Of air? The stripped-bare pine-log driftwood
Like the talon of a T-rex? What forces collided there?

And what about the shore's massed Assyrian tree-cricket,
Winged Eocene lion, its collective hiss a cosmic conch-shell,
Its veined transparency a black Juliet cap

Of diaphanous stained glass? Or the pinnacle rising
Out of turquoise bearded by current-combed Botticelli-weed,
The small moths fluttering in a seacave

Fastfood for the radar of possible bats, the brine's deep scent
In the nostrils minding me of some John Dee of natural alchemy
Or an eclogue to a microcosmos? What conjuncts there? Then inland

Round Blato and Sobra the rare brackish mud-lakes
Where it's said they take tons of eels
Coiled below sea level like silvery neurons

In the mud of the unconscious. Mysterious as images,
By what clockwork chaos does low tide trident some out
Back to the world's sargasso reaches? Why this one and not that?

Mljet, Croatia

 

Hops

It took me two decades to source the smell.
An oast-house! Wheat and barley, the taxi-man
Was after saying: but the hops is gone

For some new Celtic Tiger tap cooling-system
That left the oasts redundant. I remembered now and again
Seeing its verdigris dome-glow Xanadu and copper-plate St Patrick

Enchanting St James with Old Dublin's touch
Of Araby above the neon sunk in halberds
Down the quaking whiskey-glints of the Liffey's black

Wash under Wood Quay. Meanwhile he was rabbiting on
About rats in the Guinness vats
Doing service to porter by cleansing

Some mildew or bacteria out of the brewing mash
As we ascended a bend of artisan houses
To the gate at Kilmainham. You're sacked

If you kill a rat—and they're big as cats. At the Hop Store
They tell you the details: we give you
The ins and outs. First whiff was something sweet and roasted and yeasty;

Burnt coffee beans in a pan of aerial froth. All of an hour
Into Ireland's wan morning light, just off Aer Lingus,
Near a Georgian fanlight corner-ruins at Mountjoy Square

Twenty years later it suddenly seemed
All of a piece with the cobbles of Botany Bay . . .
The Irish Yeast Co. . . . Night's rack swirling and sculling

Its head of stout . . . A lone Italian chipper's wasteland light
In the peasoup fog of the Fruit Market, tasting my first smoked cod . . .

The smell, he thought, might linger for years.

 

A Terrible Ugliness is Born

for Michael Viney

I

That classic view from the stone bay of Trá na Rosann
Hostel, panorama of the Bay of a Saturday morning,
Ten years apart, turn-of-the-century Luytens

Still surveying winter machair, flooded and sky-clad:
Glowing indigo...