"Trees make good messengers/
in both directions."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Dingle Way
for my sister, who stayed home
If not for the politics of famine, we
Could tell a Dublin car from a Tip.
words together for a plot: where, because.
Story story. The long
She opened the light for us
First, about the mother.
After supper she stood
Books in the museum: made of bark,
* * *
If not for. Early beside the house
The story way. The way here.
Prayers can be to. They can also be of.
My husband’s from here,
Rampant on a sea of
Our mother’s family, rampant on a field of
Buddhists copied prayers to please
Then invented block prints for faster copies.
Two short stories don’t make a long one.
(You say everything twice.) Not everything.
* * *
People smoke together at the pub, play
A lovely dinner though we all talk about rats
He said he lay in the field, studying maybe,
Dingle bells, Dingle all the way,
Outside, sheep blur by, shoulders
Field: a piece of land
Hay in black plastic cubes or cylinders.
* * *
From the Latin to speak, become both
Oratory as prayer hut. Were the prayers
standing, afield. A sign of.
* * *
Air: two angels holding gospel books.
Earth: two mice holding the eucharist,
The Book of Kells looked grimy in the dim light.
The cost of memory. Cost of prayer.
Water: an otter with a fish in its mouth.
She stood, said “-----.” Said
Where is Fire? The page upon which
An old church in ruins, gray in the rain, gray
Something about its being spoken, you know.
The Gallatus Oratory. Port
Two figures, the speaker and the spoken,
As if fire uttered a sound. As if it could
* * *
Orthography changed by fiat. Whose.
In the country, in Dunquin, in Ballyferriter,
Not everyone does what everyone does.
* * *
She wrote for herself at first, then for others,
I say that in the third person. Who
* * *
Western coast again, a room above the rocky edge.
Wait. Try again. The waves.
No, the sea is oily, bread sour.
* * *
Everyone speaks some lines.
would have been born here.
Poont from pound; now they’re both
Euros. Oh, her
literary bent. Rub two
and the short of it.
The part about the mother
has to come first.
like a book. Spine cracked.
(You say everything twice.)
I know, I know.
in the field. Looking at the sky.
At nothing. Stood until
of jade. Rope, rice.
an owl called. Eerily an owl. My first Irish.
Who did what of course. Who’s related,
can’t leave that out. Families
grow on trees. Where’s she from?
his mother’s kin shipbuilders
and lighthouse keepers. (I knew
the sea’d get in here somewhere.
Inlets.) It’s an island. He can’t swim.
the gods. Handwritten strips fluttered
from branches. Trees make good messengers
in both directions.
(More than twice.) There are reasons.
So does the ocean. (So did she.)
chess and Scrabble, later darts, watch
--no, listen to—the telly. It speaks English.
and bees. Now we walk in the road.
No moon, but the night luminous,
soft, an August sky as west as you can go
without a boat. The violent high hill
and below us, dimly, islands like freighters, each
trailing its cloud to leeward. Steaming
for port? We are walking in the road
and singing. Tralee, tralee, a place
or a song? Anybody join in.
and let bees walk on him. Their feet were cold.
he and I sing later, in the car.
sprayed a blue that brightens the dun fields.
with an identity. Country, county, field.
How successfully I am neither here nor there.
With him and not. With her.
Abstractions, field of.
private prayer and public address.
sung? Choir of one. Conical, stones
fitted together in the twelfth century, still
weatherproof. Still
scrutinized by two cats with mice on their backs.
Dozens of people crowding, a guard saying
Move along there. Some colors—white lead, red
lead, yellow arsenic—even then
they knew were poisonous.
“------.” No, I can’t
remember what, only
the form of her speaking.
in the sun. Antenna glistening above it.
The timing, the timbre, the presence of a voice.
What’s written is history.
in the invisible storm,
the visible. It has stood aside from
how many wars? Has held its place.
both disembodied.
be transcribed.
Not Irish speakers. A form of suppression,
assimilation, to make the language fit
for the Internet--familiar to strangers,
strange to its people.
etas and thorns survive. Road signs
handpainted. English underneath, sometimes.
now for herself. A way of living, the living
she makes. Holds herself up to see the light
as it flows. The Liffey in a jar. The Charles.
Upper Missouri.
is that? Someone made up, make believe.
Not here, but here.
Noon, the hardest light. Sea moiling below, ice
green. Cows low, now and then a dog barks.
Birds, one cat. Sheep and flies
everywhere, nobody cares.
The waves hike their white skirts
to jump up on the rocks. The rocks
Holidays are over.
Others repeat them. Everyone makes up
a few lines of the book which is
various and vast and anonymous.
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