Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

Winter

A branch snaps loud as a bone-break.You see it flashclear as Sirius in the night sky.I'm writing a way through wintermy snow-filled pen a sprawlof linear hoarfrosta calligraphy loosely formedon a window—the heart's flame like winter sunrising in the eastsevere at that momentif you're out there in the white field.

Ghost Moth

Street light drops into a blue pool.A moth rises in a swoopand fliesto the one spot it knows.

Wind swept the earthturned everything up.The sky alien at firstfilled with dust—moths adrift in the dark.Things fall apart:a house on a hill with a crosswhole countries lost.How will we know themthe named?The eyes that dwellwhere they flamed.

Night gusts . . .ghost moths throng this small spacewing beats release a scent so potentshe comeswithout tongue or mouth.The exactness of their fit and lifttheir fall a long way downin darkness.

The moth in its small worldis master.In the stratospherewhere the winged drifteverything is nothingand the same.

Moonlight shimmies the snow-field.A bell ringsstirs the sleeping moths.Inside the book of thoughtwinter.

In the deep they driftsilent as moons.What do they do in the dark?Tinker the word chimein the silence of heart.

Script

Words flew into my heartfrom a nearby house.We were thinking the same thoughtabout love in the Soviet.A bird fluttered on the peripherya secondary characterin a play of shadows.A man shouted into my faceanother wore class like a grace—he shared everything.In the presence of grotesque beliefthe spirit curls at my feetlike a child on an open-decked boatat sea off the west coast.I'm reading from a new scriptwords that will soundin a cool anterior.

Sisters

After Auschwitz

Sisters, did you hear the sound of a trainat your shoulder?"It sped away through a tunnel of trees."

Sisters, did you see crystals of snowform to glaciers?"There were bodies in layers like thieves."

Sisters, did you speak to your keepers?"They ransacked our quarters,language hid in a bunk with fleas."

Meditation

On Temporality

1

Not the house, or where you lived, or how it was but nowas you walk outlight's bright wing above the horizon.

2

Perfect blue, uncloudedyour hand sees-through to the moon fading back at that momenta universe measured, rounded.

3

The sunflower open, its seed-black centre feedingand the present, a moment gone, in its own way nothing without earth'sturning over and around, its slow-growing, its hunger.

4

No sense now of the day before: the hours priorstanding here without memory, empty as the tree will be.The world tilting, repeating particulars in times regular and seasons.

5

No final number, no chart, a moment you remember when you were whole.Layers peel back, the daily ongoing . . . backward to a beginningthe future hidden in still-dark matter.

Lonesome Big City Dweller

He just popped onto my screen:DNA, transposition of the family line, so like beauty I'm stunned.

It's true I say to myself, we love them way beyond ourselvesthey make us the aspiration we once had.

I remember the first Surrealist book I boughtand the photomontage, Lonesome Big City Dweller:

Bayer's large eyes staring out from open palmsand I see him, our adult son, his face inside the circuitry enclosure

fixed between two spheres, a nowhere that doesn't hold him fastan image as fleeting as a sunbeam.

I imagine his shoulders sprout plumage I can feel the thrumof tiny wingbeats like a fan.

We drift in and out of conversationand I'm thinking how we slip through shapes, how we replicate:

a semblance, a word, a perspective like Bayer's ghostlyfingers fingerprinting...