Still, and: Age
Rent from DeepDyve- Still, and: Age
Still
Still morning-all's grey and green, still as the glassy lake is still,the music this one chaffinch is making the only turbulence:how it goes on, one anxiety-aria repeated and repeated, tellingits present message till we get it.
I lift the cup and hold the hot tea steaming into the minute,wreathing round the song of the bird that's nothing but presence,a present tense infinity in which despite anxieties of hunger and frightit lives wisely. We wade into early rice fragrance,
says Basho, the Rough Sea to our right- just as this mild mist-ladensalt-scented Atlantic is all around me, its plovers, gulls and ternsholding their own, the spume of its breaking pale-green wave gleaminga second or two, then vanishing, the way
the rolling echo of the noontide Angelus vanishes, tollingthe hour towards silence, restoring- as in any aftermath-stillnesstill the next wave rolls out of the unexpected and things shiver as they willat the shock of it and this rose and
slategrey bird again starts wailing. [End Page 101]
Age
What might it mean to weep between porch and altar? Be an elder of Sion? Have a pillar of fire or cloud at your shoulder? We're trying to give your father back his legs. He wonders where, what, why he is. Like a fish grown tired of the depths, he flops on the sofa sideways, slowly hauls his body into sitting. Sun falls on patchy hands, on his cottony, slightly disheveled, fine white head of hair. And falls on the dead orchid and the dazzle of white carnations that catch his eye, drawing a smile of praise as sheer as that of some Biblical somebody praising creation. But now he only asks What do I do? and waits for us to tell him. Says no again to the wheelchair. To be a babe again, and know it. No! But it stands there anyway, an uninvited guest he looks at first with curiosity, then averts his eyes. There will be other blunt presences: his gaze will light with less and less interest on them, then fix again on his fingers, on his speckled wrists, and stay there.
Eamon Grennan's most recent poetry collections are Still Life with Waterfall, which won the Lenore Marshall Prize, The Quick of It, and Matter of Fact, as well as a cotranslation (with Rachel Kitzinger) of Oedipus at Colonus. Forthcoming with Graywolf is a new collection to be titled Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems. Grennan taught for many years in the English Department of Vassar College and currently teaches in the graduate writing programs of Columbia and New York University. He divides his time between Poughkeepsie and the West of Ireland.
