The Love-haunting of Grainne

In the lake, sky-specks,
pliant clouds, more real
than when they are above.
Curlew cries.

Once, Diarmuid hoists her in his arms,
lightly, as if she were a child,
carries her across bog
still soggy with winter.
Her feet touch the ground
when the marshes are in view,
the unshadowed lattice
of yellow flag, bullrush.

A solitary bee
drops to a hazel bush,
surveys unripe catkins,
one by one.

Decisions are made:
days go on, regardless.
Like the bee,
sure of descent into succulence,
if not now, in another season.

North Coast

Once, mermaids curled on the rocks,
flicked languid tails,
dipped into water where green
tumbled from the land
to fuse with leaked sunlight.

What spilled into the seers
was the isolation of poets,
the knowledge of lovers:
they learnt to anticipate endings,
erosions. Being spilled into,
tolerant of invention,
self's mysteries multiplied.

Thus mermaids, mer-men,
hurled chariots, keeled
on spectral currents that cut
away to the Hebrides and beyond.
This evening, I yearn for peripheral vision,
never to return to inland things,
to live by rhythmic water, wind,
to watch gulls jitter and dart
by the cliff-edge.

I call the mermaid's spirit -- lock
of hair, green nick of tail,
graft of her skin between my toes:
The ocean replies:
viridian weed and hunter seal,
the young moon arches,
like a wind-filled sail.
I am engulfed.

^

Biography

Mary O'Donnell is a novelist, short-story writer and poet. Her most recent novel is 'The Elysium Testament' (Trident) and her third collection of poems was published by Salmon in 1998. She is a runner-up in the VS Pritchett Short Story Award 2000, a prize-winner in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, and she received the 2001 James Joyce 'Suspended Sentence" Award to Australia.