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.

Toro Nagashi

 on Albuquerque Bridge, Sasebo

Beneath, a spirit moves.
There are angels in the tangle
Of lanterns, lost in glow.
From the shore, furins
float jangles-
chime, hesitate, echo.
Beams of beacons slide slow
as the onset of a dream.

Elsewhere, a range of rhododendron
and not this spread of wraiths.
What river is this?
With a swim of light so real,
it must be illusion,
and nothing stirs watchers
watching moonbeams?
Sasebo. We are distant.

Now, cherish--
The luminaria sink and swell
in a miracle,
zephyrs cross east,
currents switch stream,
shadow dances flash
To turn thoughts ancestral.


Where as we, distracted,
dwell in Limbo,
they resurrect in stratums:
white gold on indigo.

Oymyakon

The only way to see it, they say,
Is as white desert.

To think each breath a memory of heat
You may never feel again, and hold.

I picture the point where the calyx
Of an alyssum stems from white

Into a full spectrum of colour.
But all is ultraviolet here

And the only separation,
Brief sun before a day of night.

Anhedonia. The slow freeze doubles.
Iced rivers run through me.


                       

Braille

Having lost the space around me,
I have been handed new language.

Not latin. More a mosaic of curves,
A map you must touch to perceive.

I scale over crevices of code,
Fingertip through creases and valleys

To find the bend where continents slip
Off the edge of themselves, to ocean.

Helicopter Seed

 after rainstick

How the heart shaped helicopter seed
is her heart in the silverlight of dawn
paints the scene a pageantry. A blessing.

Her flail, both furious and delicate,
falls blizzard-like in the haze of a hurricane
(where storms become the love of storms)

and lets fly, rises and spreads wing
so that what happens next is a joy
we could not know to hope for:

an effusive half-stop of descent,
lost in atmosphere, holds- then releases-
as if a shift in the everlong of life.

Lady Venice

Tonight, I have come to lie in her arms.
It is not the melancholy of her beauty
Or the rèmo'd slow-brush of ripples
That make this city heart-breaking.
Our reflections swell as they take us in.

Yet, how are we to claim possession
Of our own existence as the mirrors
Of her canal fold beneath us,
And buildings sink where they stand?
We succumb to the archipelago's chagrin.

Transient sailor, Serenissima, Holy Lady:
Something in the way your daydream
Makes an auster of the breeze
Sends our thoughts to the artesian well
And paints you a widow, or a widow's daughter.

So. Since she is only touched by death,
I will etch my name here in limestone
On a San Michele sideboard tomb
And submerge in the inevitable flood.
Tonight, I have come to lie in her arms.

Shelter

Decided on there not being a voice,
she instead lay each veil against mine
silently. Within a breeze.
A breeze born in thoughts of Pacific warmth,
sailing through each sun-dappled stranger
like a wish wished and suddenly gone
until hitting the cold stone reality
of a hand ball alley back in Mullaghmore-
where we sat, huddled and smothered.

Our backs to the ballast of an unused cockleshell
we were soon to be grateful of,
as another ocean wave made large
over the courtside wall in a sluice of hostility
and splashed the port side rust,
echoing the diminuendo of shelter,
in an upturned rainstick's vaulted tunnel
only we knew had ever existed.

Anamnesis

Creosote tar, ashen silt on asphalt,
the creak of an oak falling far off
being the cry of her in love. Remember
this when the wheels fall off,
when the keel shifts slow to dock

and night removes from dusk.
Day does not bring these tragedies
home. And you, still in love
yet distant in the shadow of love,
blank as a snow drift drifting.

Covered by the truest daze, steady,
and not the last of the many
that would not be enlightened:
Noah in the flood, Moses on the rock,
Jesus launching his slanted syllables.

What love will you bring to the city?
Falling towers? Light?A spring dawn
on the nape your neck?
Solar panels will flash and hum
to complete the lunar silence.

Backward of her, love is the wet
of a fuck on an April lawn,
where torture bears name and green
is the only shade that separates.
Fully in the whims of her youth,

now recalled with you there.
Her breath flailing like cursive,
italicised in the hush of a breeze.
Distant, distant, distant.