Eilean Ni Chuilleanáin

When I heard the voice on the radio
All of a sudden announcing the captives were free
I was holding my young cousin
Forcibly down with two arms
...

The child's teeth click against the marble.
Her ear is crushed cold against the slab,
The dredged flour almost brushed by her hair
She traces with her eye her mother's hand.
...

If I produce paralysis in verse
Where anger would be more suitable,
Could it be because my education
...

The sound of everything folding into sleep,
A sense of being nowhere at all,
Set him on his way (traffic far off, and wind
In tall trees) to a back gate, a dark yard.
...

I begin from the highest point,
Best of all a belltower.

I see the tops of heads, cobbles,
Terraces all scuttling down
...

He lay plunged in the funnel of a beanbag,
The glass in his hand as deep as a fjord.
The other went out to answer the telephone,
...

I saluted the famous river as I do every year
Turning south as if the plough steered,
Kicking, at the start of a new furrow, my back
To the shady purple gardens with benches under plum trees
By the river that hunts between piers and sandbanks—

I began threading the long bridge, I bowed my head
And lifted my hands from the wheel for an instant of trust,
I faced the long rows of vines curving up the hillside
Lightly like feathers, and longer than the swallow's flight,
My road already traced before me in a dance

Of three nights and three days,
Of sidestepping hills and crescent lights blinding me
(If there was just a bar counter and ice and a glass, and a room upstairs:
But it rushed past me and how many early starts before
The morning when the looped passes descend to the ruined arch?)

She came rising up out of the water, her eyes were like sandbanks
The wrinkles in her forehead were like the flaws in the mist
(maybe a long narrow boat with a man lying down
and a rod and line like a frond of hair dipping in the stream)
She was humming the song about the estuary, and the delights
Of a salt ocean, the lighthouse like a summons; and she told me:

The land will not go to that measure, it lasts, you'll see
How the earth widens and mountains are empty, only
With tracks that search and dip, from here to the city of Rome
Where the road gallops up to the dome as big as the sun.

You will see your sister going ahead of you
And she will not need to rest, but you must lie
In the dry air of your hotel where the traffic grinds before dawn,
The cello changing gear at the foot of the long hill,

And think of the story of the suitors on horseback
Getting ready to trample up the mountain of glass.
...