La Teine

A portal between mornings, a line of filigree
as he stands in front of the sun.
Old lightsmith, the splash iron,
torc and tongs.

The alder is a nerve exposed
from this dead ground, the old core
of bird bones and other things,

little larynx in the sedge, a soft fluting
in wait to be flushed out
by a cold shoot of breeze.

The dog is here as well, in search of the living.
Black movement between weeds,
mud plants, the lone alder
losing leaves.

He imagines pink nesting places
where small things lived,
and buries himself there too.

His Hands Were Red Cathedrals

It was just a father in a boat
telling me about ‘our boys’,
his thumb a whorl of cuts
from the dip and hook of baiting.

The gun they named Peter the Painter
after one such incident,
then the short burst of the phrase itself as I say it.

During warmer months
his hands were red cathedrals, big with work,
clasped against the piety of soil,
his dirt pillars,

here we stung anchors to the sound,
where the tide’s slow withdraw
left black gums of sand beneath my barefoot walk,
the water thick against the glossy oar slop
and the sea like memory absorbing.
Forgetting is a winter occupation.
Be British, boys to your bellybone
and chuck a chum a chance!

Over the gurgle of an outboard a gull appears
and I follow it past the white geometry of fields,
the beehive huts, the mud road going numb in fog,
the weather of my breath like January death,
his voice an ungated cemetery calling me back.

Palimpsest

We’ve seen these things before:
a boat goaded into inlets
then between an archipelago
of icecaps etched on plaster,

a dink machine of maps
charts, the occidental plane
the Boolean bulbul.
A clod carrier walks

the mathematics of a ship-wreck,
the leeward double-helix
at the genome heart,
ingress of the sleeping-vaults

polished upwards by axes
in a black-blunting drizzle
and the whetstone spun, and spun.
What we heard that morning

was not the thaw, the freeze
the sea tensing its drum
or your throat turning to ice.
Moving south along the faded latitude

I shine a rivet, snap the spine of a snake
and leave it there to form a river
men will break their backs
trying to cross.

^

Biography

I live and work in Cork City. I have been writing both fiction and poetry for several years, and have been published on-line in Disquieting Muses and The Quill.