John F. Deane

The first dense fog this morning, everything
indistinct. Small birds

flitting among stones at the waves' edge; last night
along laneways and in the meadows,

heavy tractors laboured on, their headlights flaring;
among the sand dunes rabbits

played with cloudshadows from the moon; now a fox
in her potched, gold-chestnut fur

scents out her lost escape-ways through the lopped-down grass;
I have been picturing

a straight and solitary figure pacing the roads and shoreline
as if washed up onto the world

like jetsam flung by the breaking reach of the waves,
who has words to offer, words

in an antique language beautiful as moonlight and sharp
as the teeth of the mowers,

while the world feels for him, offering
unwanted coin.
...

I am in California. The moon -
colour of grandmother's Irish butter - is lifting
over the Mount Diablo hills and the sky
is tinged a ripening strawberry. You sleep
thousands of miles from me and I pray your dreams
are a tranquil sea. Eight hours back
you watched this moon, our love-, our marriage-moon,
rise silently over our Dublin suburb, and you
phoned to tell me of it. I sit in stillness
though I am called where death is by; I am eating
night and grief in the sweet-bitter flesh
of blueberries, coating tongue and lips with juice
that this my kiss across unconscionable distances
touch to your lips with the fullness of our loving.
...

A sparrow flew, as if a hawk were in pursuit,
into the sanctuary of our seminary chapel;
I was quenching candles, relishing the afterscent;

it perched a while on a small brass crucifix
over the tabernacle, and I remembered: better are you
than many sparrows, and laughed, not being sure . . . I stood,

hesitant companion, the congregation with its shuffle-noise
had gone out into the good air; for a while -
acolyte and bird - we watched each other, intrigued

and waiting; the sparrow flew towards the rose window
where it thudded hard against deceptive blue; it fell,
slowly, to the marble floor and I gathered it up, scared,

knowing, for a moment, what it may be to be God,
a small heart hammering against my caring hands; outside
sweet scents from the heathers came and clouds drifted

across blue late-evening skies; when I opened my hands
the sparrow stayed still a little while, perhaps
mistrusting of the grace it had just received.
...

for Tim Sheehan
McGarvey and I were young and male and speaking
of the concupiscence of eyes, of flesh,
of the pride of life; our God, old Taskmaster,
demanded of us perfection, suffering and Latin.

McGarvey and I were dressing boards
of flesh-coloured deal, dovetailing them
into library shelves when the chisel,
curved like the quarter moon, slipped, and sliced

into my index finger; maladroit, I watched
blood spurt until the pain scalded me
and I sat down, stunned, amongst wood-shavings
and white dust; in illo tempore seminarians,

McGarvey and I (like Christ himself) were in otherwhere
on carpentry assignment, though I was more
for the study of Aquinas and the Four Last Things, more
apt with pen and paper and the ancient texts;

my finger-flesh had lifted and I tied it, tight,
with my seminarian's white handkerchief - you're
pale as a ghost, McGarvey said, that ghost
still with me now, pen in hand, wandering the world,

a fine-curved scar on my index finger;
a solitary gladiolus, elegant and tall,
of a cardinal brightness, beckons to me
from outside the window, and that young seminarian -

misfit and eager, trenchant and melancholy
in the pursuit of love - haunts me still, his God
and McGarvey's God, displaced, replaced, my God
untonsured now, and feminine, and here.
...

The day he reached, furtively,
into his inside pocket and showed me

my poem cut from the newspaper, was the day
I knew I loved him. I remembered

watching him in the brown-dark, stuffy office,
there by the seaweed reaches of Achill Sound,

while his pen scratched uneasily across
official forms, though his mind, I knew,

was on the rocks beyond Purteen
where the mackerel shoaled, where the seal

lifted its head heavy with water-wisdom
to take him in. When he finished with the form

he laid aside the pen, held a match
to a stump of red wax, as if he signed

some easy-going labourer's doom with a drop
of his own blood. At home, in the margins

of his books - Gorky, Goethe, Proust -
his notes and exclamations trailed and turned

like the irascible and business-like marking out
of ants in their tasks and turns; and always

in the breast pocket of his jacket, two pens
visible, the plump and easy-tempered

fountain pen and the biro, slim-fit, quick to the threads
of the imagination. To whom I owe the steady

application to the word, the flourished signing of my name,
as if I had captured some quick creature in the net.
...

Again the parlour has filled to overflowing
with the beloved dead - and I

stand distraught outside the great blurred window
looking in; little light where I am,

a soft persistent starlight; where they are, there are chandeliers,
though the dead are distant, a little

indistinct; they have been blown, perhaps, through the open door
into the hallway, like those several

beautifully veined and parti-coloured leaves, old gold and scarlet,
from the trees that stand

bereft of summer, bare-head to the chilled and chilling
sky; and have wandered in

through that other door we never opened, and though they are
a little ruffled at the edges, a little

sere, they are upright and lightly swaying, the best crystal
in their hands; grandfather, possibly,

in the far corner, by the walnut cabinet, a vague
moustachioed figure, Nanna, wearing

her best of smiles, serving; closer, by the oil-lamp,
motherfather, fathermother, relishing -

as they never did before - a happy foolishness; closer still,
behind the net-curtained window, my

brother, cured of all ills, and laughing; there is a shadowy
and shrouded host-like figure

moving quietly amongst them, greeting them all with a little
laughter. Ah well, we have allowed them

this one month to be amongst us, this first mustering
of winter, as if they were not always there

before our consciousness, calling out against our grieving.
...