5.The Terror - Duncan McGibbon (book club books txt) 📗

of my beloved,
you, the patterned of joy.
Sensual shape, you move in broken beams.
Your shuttered room is not a keep.
You turn your arms in cluttered skies
Still the pool darkens where we thirst for sun.
Still the drop trembles,
where it cannot be seen.
It is a trickle. Soon it will cut in the face.
Slowly the undertow flows to blinded shores.


5.
You, the babbling one,
the enlivened stream.
You drown her lashes.
A slow, great eye is covered
by separate lids
and each beats for the warmthstead.
Still the gold of willow-leaves
glints under cilial coppice-bars.
Still fundi of alder buds.lay bare our unfilled hollows.
It is your gaze. It will spill with flowers.
Dead shapes mingle in the tide of noon.


6.
Caved under ridges
you, the tongued,
the wakener of throats.
You, the loosened,
you put a blind hand into fear.
and you, the hearth of words,
you mould us in the manshape.
Still each dapple is in the light.
Still each wave is dappled in the water.
It is our breath. It is in the wind. It clears the gathered fear.
The water burns. The sunshafts flow. The wind finds speech.


Charmouth Beach

All day we husbanded our children’s awe,
while the midsummer waves pushed flotsam,
employable to sea-spit fingers on the shore.
Sifted, hauled, then heaped on altars of sand,
become gifts to a lord of excitement,
so much driftwood, sea-carnage, twisted stone.
minted a coinage that spume never spent.

Then, as I stood by the brittle river-mouth,
I saw an elver thrust its torque of ribbon
against the current’s force, a thing uncouth
beside that splintered shingle, come up from
the cervix of the channel, which welled under
the waves’ living glaze, stretching, vast, down
past hispid fringes of dead-mans finger.

and, away past land,to the fells and vens
of the ocean’s Sargasso heart.
from such matronal depths, a journey lay open
in which that throbbing lace barely took part.
Only from those shales of dry adulthood
would my thirsting w eye perceive a fine loss.
Seen, then gone, I sought a second, or a shoal.

Our success was to stay on a sound foreland.
and envisage a second enlivening.
By late afternoon, we had split rocks by hand.
Fissures parted to bare only a fossil offering
to the air. By then we knew our gifts were surpassed
and we waited for the second elver,
now that the first was woven to our past


At Chingford

In the clearing, a stealthy jay surveyed us.
Polished black beetles crawled for the puff-balls
beneath drying tree-barks in Chingford.
What was this place that I should think of time?
Acorns slowly tilted reddened cobs to the sky.
Under the fern-floor’s cover, squirrels rustled
by sapling ash-trees, which quivered of their visit.
My thoughts were held on God’s perfect thought,
while spiders staggered by sunlit hoof-prints,
hollowed from clay in rain and baked in warmth,
We noticed the ash was moving in on standard oak.
His perfect knowledge cannot think of ignorance.
I put my arm around your shoulder, while
a ladybird started to climb on a stem of meadow grass.
His timelessness too is surely unaware of us, unless all time
is illusion, that futile prayer of intellectuals.
The jay had followed us into the woods,
Now he started on an un- firm branch and vanished.
Heavy in comfort, we lay in the ochre sun,
while the ladybird gripped its varnished tube and mounted.
Yet time must be real for faults to be forgiven.
Across your cheek the sunlight trimmed its course.
A sound from close by stirred you, held you still.
We heard a shrill piping from the base of a bush.
Yet for us and the ladybird, if time is real,
God’s knowledge of us must be imperfect.
You followed the sound and stopped by blackberries,
where a nest of infant robins craned their fire of yellow beaks,
They took us for providers to their hungering crops.
How can he know our time-slaked day, or feel our past?
Yet at His word, His acts we crane our necks.
with hungry mouths expecting His provision.
The mother robin tried to lead us off,
feigning the pretence of a nest elsewhere.
We took the path away from the clearing.
Then the jay returned and I thought of the ladybird,
climbing its vast trunk of grass.
Would the Lord lead my thoughts away from doubt
and let me climb, as the Robin diverts its predators.
The earthly path wound on ahead of us.
to the meadow where children were flying kites
Perhaps, he knows them too. Their kites might
not be seen in time, but falling and flying
at once, seen on a field of uncountable options.
By now the ladybird will have reached the top
and the robin would have fed its brood.
Spiders would be re-spinning webs,
yet God might see them now, as one,
might see us as we left the woods,
might still see the jay as it guarded our exit.

Salt Grass, Lymington Spit

Their stringy stalks bind up
the shifting marsh.
Each stem shelters pasture
in pithy roots,
whose paps will suckle land.
They will not give.
Nothing can displace them
in metaphor,
or transplant their meaning.
Since Viking fear
awed at marram grass, its hand
has haulmed seas,
whose storms would have seized all,
for its dead depths.
had grass not been to slight
to merit rage.
The raving tide will glut
all life that breathes.
Yet after violence,
glumes foster scars
and husband sanity.
There is no pain
or shame, whose shore
does not again,
harbour a frugal dignity,
or remembrance
of strength, which, once sought for,
will not again grasp grains
and found an entire field,
gripped by still threads
from the jagged edge of waste.

At Annascaul

Nights, dumb sea-trout sense, without sight,
the feed of cold fear in the tow of the creek.
We lay on our backs in the valley Albion trod,
in Spillane’s field, under canvas volleyed by gales.
He comes , a giant, with a bronze-head, swimming
slowly to shore to scatter his causeway of hate
to the cloud-clothed heights.

Cries from a larynx of hate, punched the peat-girl
to a frenzy that shocked stone. While Albion slept
under Plunkett’s tree, our ears were not tuned
to the tongues of fable. Our ears could not catch
the hunger for dread, which urged on
the ice-sweating fish to gorge at the wolf-rock.
We lay with the rubble of Lady Dunboyne’s
bothies beneath us.

She runs where the giant’s foot has kicked against the land.
Frosts, in the embittered air, as gaunt fish hang
in the brackish swim, still to come in from the seas,
to swill their hulks into the river’s trench.
Our snouts could not smell the drift of burning,
our ears could not hear the hiss of the Tudor
arrows singing compline to their mark.

The giant’s arm pulls at the turf of her smock,
which tumbles to mud. Numb at the river’s edge,
Aobheall raises a thickening mist, not deep enough
for the pillar of Carrigblagher, which fills her hollow
as it falls. Seeing the land lies bare, the giant wields
a fixed blade of law and severs her hams, which
bleed to the sea, down the path of his footsteps,
where we slept under canvas.

The girl turns into ground as wolves howl
for the rotten acorns, the honey dry on stones
and the salt in her tears. At the giant’s knee,
they cut a furrowed trace across her thighs.
Her eyes speak of hollows, speak the bare bracken.
We came by the river that ran past Stella’s bower.
Our ears could not hear the skirl of her grief,
backs flattened to the rocks,
as stiff as a cottager’s yard.

Under a faltering moon, the fishes glide.
where red stones are bleached in its light.
Struck to the barren lands, the Liadan sinks,
where the stilled lake lies before her,
senseless of the drone in the muscle of her cheek
rallying Cuchullain from Benoskee
to run eastwards at her last scream
ramming a shoulder of land
that has the grey fish to turn, rolling cold eyes
in the changed light sieved through the stream.

Splintered in Cuchullain’s heart,
the hills become Cumeen.
He totters under the nerve-hail, falls
at the thunder of bones in the dark.
Where a wind shakes the blackberries,
leans where the wild grass is stirred
by the whiteboy’s breath
that ceases on the tautened hemp
with an oath that stills the reeds by the stream,
we lay on the ferns on the valley’s brushwood.

Skins are dragged, screaming over rocks,
where the trickle of cuttings widens
to flow endless and feed the cold lake.
Wounded flesh shrinks into rock
where blood peals from the fissures.
The giant’s torso stiffens as Cuchullain’s
missles stack, pile upon pile
in the giant’s Bath-terrace belly.
We lay on Spenser’s plough fields,
under the awe of a blight in the clouds.

The Lissadell girl dies of consumption,
at the hero’s last breath, his arm stretched out.
Our hands opened only to the fire of our fathers,
yet the giant’s last rage has fractured his strength
in a rush of black slabs beneath a pale sky.
Torn from the sea, the rock-clouds lumber
to flood out the stars in the haze.
We lay on our backs on John Maxwell’s trench

Skul, the maiden, lost in black waters
when Cuchullain, the last, fell through the jaws
of his country in gale of defeat. His last roar
winnows three bodies into sand.
We lay under light rains, deaf to the creatures,
which smell for the thrall, for the frenzy
of the last wolf shot, the last priest hanged
and the land’s head of hair
that will not turn grey to placate
the earthen lust of Eimher’s lament,
whose skirl our ears were never tuned for.


Wicklow, the Sally Gap.

Gorse-clad scarps reserve a drought, filled
with emptiness, deeper than their height.

The hollows have discovered their mass,
where failing plantations lose their grip.

Each new birch sprouts from a family,
wasted by young shadows, which have walked off.

What they sought, the absent, is unknown,
is, in any case, forgotten here.

The bare book broke open its spine, wrenched
the saplings, buried in the dumb soil.

Its billowing pages could not contain
its stories, shattered against stone years.

Successive prunings did not lighten
the piled up weight of fervent handfuls,

before remnant grafts could suckle sap.
Here, the loss alone grows touchable,

for woods could still stir rumours abroad
yet whispered faces cannot align

with transplant grandchildren, recovered,
friendless, from barren wanderings.

Each dead tree’s syllable casts a shade,
clearer than the living voice;

the references split.


Gaillimnh

Dicit eis Jesus, “Implicit hydrias aqua.

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