Because You Are Leaving

Because you are leaving, I paint a gift
Of sky for you. Love, in water colour.
A tarpaulin of equal-blue so clear
That should first dream fall on you
Tonight- there will be a vision of sun
In the corner of your mind, spilling light.

Though you cannot yet know light,
You must learn to separate darkness. Present
Now is cloud, eclipsing half the sun,
So when shadow meets explosion of colour,
It illuminates not the loss of you,
But the way you've touched the sky, as clear

As it is dark. Coastline develops, clear
Statues of rock split a shore where light
Unveils an outline that is you,
Older now. Conclusive proof of presence
In the portrait of life. The colours
Of water, first sleeving a foot, then sun

In its extravagant gleam, doing as sun
Does in its all-overing. You are clear
To me, and though I know how colour
Cavorts out of shape, I hold your light.
Imagine you swell, rise and take this gift
Of a world catching fire for you.

Out of reach. They announce the time. You
In a glass box, fading. Outside, Sun-
Set flickers, flashes a tail, its fleeting gift
Leaves us in an instant. The clear
Of night rolls in to cancel daylight
With moon holding sway over sky and colour

So I'm left to know you only in the colours
I paint: the last train leaving the coast, you
Lost in the beginnings of life, an ocean light-
Show erupting around us and the sun
Collapsing in a hundred thousand clear
Cut diamonds across water so finally the gift

To a departed son erupts in clear
Colour: white-gold on crystal-blue, a gift
Of sky holding you in its eulogy of light.

In Elysium

I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.
-Seamus Heaney, A Herbal.

1.

Night speeds by, and we, Seamus,
Lose it in lamenting.
So when you take your place by Oceanus,

Do not look back. Go with garland
Of flower and wreath entwining
Your hand. Throw over Elysian field

That gaze of all-forwarding you combined
For us when you came at last with Latin-
Out of Noli, to not yield

And timere, to fear.

2.

Elysium? Why not Magherafelt
In late September.
A light rain composing the lough
It falls to. And you there, still,
In briar and moss, in sphagnum
And downpour, in mother and child,
In lake water and rainfall-
In each small way life reminds us
Of life happening, all at once.

3.

Or Bellaghy, where just now
A knell as tainted in the rising

As in the falling
Whirred up so furiously

That nothing could resettle right.
Songbird joined blackbird,

Sky stilled against wind,
Light became a conclave of darkness

So that when we looked up,
Each of us wore the shadow lines

Of another world's reflection.

Snow Water

The first fell in late-light. Slow, slow,
Quick-slow, a czardas of snow and syllables
Dancing the space between us; poises
Of silence ambushing the air, the sky,
Atmosphere itself- until a crystal landed
Your skin- flickered, froze, let swim.
We woke to the polar opposite of noise.

And it wasn't until I considered how snow-water
Stills to ice before melting
That it came to me how love happened.
Not sublimation. More a convergence
At vanishing point of two equals;
A way of knowing ahead of knowing,
For certain, what the heart would miss.