Margin, and: Scribe, and: How We Were Transfigured, and: The Just Use of Figures

Margin

Yesterday I read about the hawk moth,common enough in the westand south of this island—

how it can slow its brain downat the end of the day so as to see betterin the failing light.

Today I waited for the last April cloudinessto turn dark.

I walked out in our neighborhood as hillsslipped into the horizon.

How will we see inside it,our own dusk?

Flags rising. Memories failing.No one left to say who thosemen in the photograph are.

Old quarrels clothed in a hundred years of heat,now shivering in the cold.

I walked on past lighted windows,drawn curtains.

It was colder now and the intimate unsettled colorsshowed me up, a transient, a womandressed for warmth,

telling the island to myself, as I always have,so as to see it more clearly:

Not the land of fevers and injuries. But the regionI found for myself,described for myself in my own language,

so I could stand if only for one moment,on its margin.

Scribe

Under an arc of stars,on a cold night, in a moral dark,his hand is straying from

the vowels he has flayedall afternoon with azurite.The poem he begins in the margin

does not know how to saythe striking distance the shipsare within nor the word Viking.

The monk moves his penfrom the image to the edge,from the icon to the margin.

He writes: as the harboris welcome to the sailorso is the last line to the scribe

How We Were Transfigured

Now when darkness starts        in midafternoon,when evening comes to show us            its unwelcome    half-sliced winter moon        I remember dayswhen I never thought twice about            what was farther off    from the four walls of our        house, from the hillsabove it, from our infant daughters sleeping            in it or what lay        in wait for us on the Irish Sea            as darkness moved upand away and we slept on oblivious            to the rain's drizzle,    the tap and flicker of it,        to what was comingsilently, insistently, to render        our lives visible to us again:            light the builder,light the maker, fitter of roofs to gutters,    of the tree's root        to the tree's height,            of earth to sky:        assembler of openings atthe river's mouth and the mind's eye.

The Just Use of Figures

Silence was a story, I thought,on its own and all to itself. Thenthe storm came. It came to uswith bulletins, forecasts, data,each coordinate warning usthe doors of the ocean were opento a wind with an appetitefor roadside bins, roofs,treetops, the painted henhousemade to stop foxes that blew awayas lightly as the hat the woman failedto hold on to as she walked pastStephen's Green, a sudden gustcatching it: wood and wire meshthat had once sheltered handsas they warmed to new eggson a winter morning nowstirred into flight over fencesand scoured grass.            Hours earlierit was quiet in the garden.The pigeons we were used tohearing all morning were all gone.Outside the window it seemeda space had opened, an emptiness.I knew then what I wantedto write was not stormsor wet air, it was somethingelse: it was metaphor and yetwhat was made for languagewhen language cannot carry meaning failed there. InsteadI learned in the hushed gardenbefore the wind rose whatI needed to know. Silence told the story.