A Chinese Woodcut

Wood and metal in the eye mock
stone and earth on the slow drive
through a gap in Donegal where
the sun is molten in the stroop
of mountains and the lake seems
to gleam and tarnish like sodium
cut and cut by a pocket-knife wind.
The trees stand rigid as scuts
of pig-iron out on the corroded
copper headland and gorse is brass
on the mahogany mountain.

I am following a man I hardly knew,
being driven to his wake thinking,
in his blind eye, which of the two is alien:
to know that in a foreigners eye everything
can be seen in terms of metal and wood
or to realise that the day after you die
a stranger sees why the crane flies west.

Going West

At the foot of the gable, that stands like a tomb-stone,
I hear the repining prayer of the river percolating stone.

Words are dying all around this glen,
I hear them dissipate west into the sun.
How long before this field is nameless?
Before the land itself gives up its grip on words
that echo out of this valley, exit the world?

I feel the night falling, a smothering darkness
lying on rocks, winding shrouds of silence around ground.

Like the wind rattling through the hillside trees,
my pen scrapes at the paper, and before I know it,
night has strewn itself on the stones, so softly
it might be the sea's prayer on the rocks,
eroding, eroding.

The Naming Of Things

Here in the winter
Where I walk the blue dawn
Houses shake
Their sleep from them
In yellow light
After yellow light.
The last of silence
Creaks its way to life
And business-like
A shop-shutter flutters
Open after a stammering start.

I am a stranger here,
An invader from the north,
Come through a hill gap
And across rivers
Learning their names.
I know nothing
Of the fire in the gap,
The invisible falls.
One place to me
Is very like another.

But I will start
Right at the beginning,
As a child would
With the naming of things.

^

Biography

Nigel McLoughlin was born in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh in 1968. His work has appeared in The Guardian and the Independent on Sunday and in literary journals in Ireland, UK, Japan, Belgium, USA and Australia. He has been twice short-listed for the Sunday Tribune/Hennessy Award and placed in the Kavanagh Award. His first collection At The Waters' Clearing was published jointly by Flambard and Black Mountain Presses in 2001. His second collection, Songs for No Voices, is forthcoming Black Mountain Press. Nigel is also co-editor of the Breaking the Skin anthologies of 21st century Irish writing, which were published by Black Mountain Press in 2002.