M. T. C. Cronin

for Georg Trakl


Autumn can last a lifetime.
There can never be enough blue and black.
Wandering has a passion of its own.
A suffering without direction.
There is only one month.
There is only one large death.
The country opens onto its unploughed fields.
A short lyric is one who passes.
Made of earth and coarse poetry.
No longer ears and eyes.
No longer indignance and inclination.
What sort of desire is unreasonable?
What sort of living?
Landscapes occur as if they were limits.
Repentance seeps from the body in breath.
Winds have speech with shadows.
Paths break into the infinity along their sides.
Autumn again after the last Autumn. Beyond, a man's back.
He is always walking away.
He turns many times to glimpse his executions.
Empty.
The world is empty of him.
Only time is filled to the brim with his unending selves.
Everywhere they vanish like fallen snow.
...

for Jack Gilbert


The fog in these mountains
is a reminder
of how far up our feet are
when they are on the ground.
As the baby has aged
she has taken up wrestling
with my breast.
As if the milk had bones.
The gorge is like owning something
frightening, merging with the self
what won't sustain life.
The stars' odour.
The man who felt so keenly
that all around him hearts broke
like the tears of a young girl
for an animal.
Occasionally you hear the gunshot
and yellow-headed birds
with the fan of their wings
spin fear into beauty.
The children don't remember the city.
Its expensive horizon.
Here, they listen to a history
of sing-song in the rain.
Here, where God never says anything.
...

He climbed a persimmon tree
And became a persimmon
For four and half hours
And when they came
He had to question them
If they were human
Because their names
Were in their pockets.
As a persimmon Lindsay
Was very successful
If out of season
And heavy for the branch:
When nameless they came
To lay the tree down
He was as sweet
And without fear as a fruit.
Becoming a persimmon
Is good for a man
And becoming a man again
Is like something
You must admit.
The persimmon in its skin
Unlike a man knows
Exactly what destiny
Is doing today.
...

BELONGING
for P.B.
‘I am looking for sunlight'

I saw your world begin
A night of dawns
Time kept coming round to that
Our reception of the light
The silence of the sun
As it crept spectacularly
Towards us

When I saw how it revealed you
My own paths curved
To find the circle
They had once been

Words here are simply sighs
The hums and satisfactions of animals
Click in the back of my throat
That might be the cricket or cicada
In Summer ventriloquy
Or the snake becoming new
Over the friendly rock

It has become simple for me
To think of these things now
That the idea of the fragment
Has given its secrets
To the whole

The leaves which feared separation
Fell
And the water telling and retelling
Itself passes by the place of this event
Only to pass again
The sky with that big voice saved
For the moments its own story is known
Whispers
The earth:

Come on little bird
The trees are holding you up
Come possum
With your hearty feet leaving prints
On the porcelain roofs of dreams
Come grains
And mountains, lakes, orchards
Leave your importance
And follow these clouds
To where they have no meaning

Turtle
Are you coming
With your knowledge of origins and regret?
Children, bring the hearts
Of forests
And the abilities of the sand

We'll walk over that hill
Where the path curves out of sight
Do not rush
It is not the future ahead of us
But a slow becoming
Time weaves itself
Into the very swing of your arms
That space left
Where you lift your foot
...

LONELINESS
Where am I going with this pain
Marvellous for a lot of things
- for climbing walls
- and crawling scalps
- for leaving the moment
out of pure desperation
But with my mind packed up,
where do I go?

to a church?
No the church is full of glassblowers
this pain is not fragile enough
for their pursed lips to blow

to a butcher?
No there they have red hands
this pain is too raw and lonely
for their sharp blades to cleave

to the town hall?
No the town hall echoes with excuses
this pain is too forgetful of its host
for apologies

So I took it to a bridge
And half way out -
with the prospect of somewhere to go -
that crazy pain jumped!
And I went in after it
believing that even this death
should not go
uncompanioned
...

SLEEP
Half the Shadowed World


Sleep, like peaches
fallen to the ground
(hand pressed to the

cheek), boot-bruised
side cannot feel.
Juice in the earth.




Shadow of a Unicorn


This horse on its knees
in the field
Pretending to be a unicorn
As horses play and imagine
Another day
A night
Black trees . . .

The horse on its feet
has grown a horn and saddle
Imagines the voice
Of a rider:
Those far hills
Are simply shadows
Of these you stand on . . .




The Doorweb


Listen at the keyhole of light.
The doorweb.
Shimmering across.
Shimmering like a cocked horse.
Ready to fire.

Hot hooves are on my head tonight.
The room's flat and dark as ears.
On the roof the cumquat tree.
Offering sweet peel to the moon.

My bed.
Is filled up with time.
...

CONTRAPOSITION
sun & rain


‘What is there here but weather, what spirit
Have I except it comes from the sun?'


I have grown my wisdom
on summer days

and watered it with both rain
and melting snow

I have helped it
up ladders

and sat with it
still upon a tired step

I have tasted it like a bite
of fruit and unlike fruit

savoured that same bite
over and over

I have moved it
within my arms

and of nights cried for it
to leave me sleeping

and then dreamed it
to take a different form

something now unknown
and not like any shape

I have whispered or word
I ran my hands about

I was shocked but don't know why
I should have been

when I looked in a mirror
painted over

and I let my wisdom die
with the relaxing cells

that slow upon my body
and quickly fall aside

I use it to discard myself well
in the world

and when the world
is not mine

I will have no need
of the glorious shelter it will erect

in the place where that which
has sheltered me now stands

in the end I will sit down
without it

and know nothing
of the weather




sun & rain 2


Are sun and rain narratives
that focus on collective experience
or does this warmth
on the bridge of my nose,
this droplet hanging
from the hair of my brow,
weave itself from a story
that needs no universe?

I honestly don't want
to muck around with the weather.
It seems to have
such a nice indifference.
Like the storm that just came in
and destroyed all our hopes
after such a beautiful Summer.
Remember our sincerity.
...

FORTUITY (SHEEL OF CLOUDS)
1. one excuse


One excuse was to say
I forgot the time
(or you simply ran out
of time)

Time, for something so
relative;
(lying on the beach):
works remarkably well
(we always used it
instead of humour)

There was always plenty
of it
to fight in
And none left
to quickly make love in
the morning (before work)

(We'll make up for it
later)
But there was a storm
(and you had to spend
the night)
in another town
looking over the sun

But rain rains down
inside my ear
With that noise
inside of shells
(It never changes)
and I can't hear
(that you are waiting)

But I don't need
any evidence to know
that time
is culpable




2. two ways of arriving at surrealism


How many dreams
present the life of the protagonist?
the girl with only one heart?
someone on the run?

He was standing on the corner
miming a scene of torture
when he heard the first sound
(more like somethin' bashed into somethin'
than somethin' bashed loose)
and his leg fell into the gutter
He had his foot in the stream
The sun, just pulling up its toes
under that cloud
At that moment he knew
just what that leg was worth
(he had no idea, exactly,
what a leg was worth)

The girl was walking,
so slow down the beach
Crying. Her tears
delivered up to her
by clouds
with tiny hands of salt
She's got straight hair
and a new nose
(they bashed it with a little hammer
till it came loose)
It was worth a lot to her -
she even gave up
being the Queen of Egypt

And it was only by accident:
the car with a scalpel;
the surgeon losing control;
inside a shell, the sky -




3. three times around the moon


And it's just a game
Put it up to your ear

Out driving
the shadows rush to meet us
Our mistakes

He asked
Can we still be in love
when dirt is falling
from the sun
With the moon
rolling its knuckles
over my back

And she was slow
like a snail
to answer
Go another three
times round
the sky
It's safe -
we live inside
...

AUTHORSHIP
Mountains, valleys, rivers merge
The land hides itself
in landscape
The day's form buried in my eye
like a grandmother in her coffin

The havoc of life is closed to the look
The shadow has taken to one eye
Ancient nights are never as old
as the days, simply light
all seen, unsaveable

The bittenness of her face
Madarosis and skin submerged
in sweet lake of destruction
deeper than this time
I note with now

The book that is better
tells of your embrace
The rockweed and the small fish
being careful in the nooks
of tossed waters

Death is not sudden
like stumbling into this love
but takes every beat of the heart
Joy married over and over
to the cough, the wheeze, the biographer
...

CONDUIT
Water, water song
my body flows with
thoughts and blood

Remember the sickness
when my body would
allow not even water

I would die in a place
with no rustles
no movement

A bird would come
without moving
its wings

Perhaps in the
transubstantiation
of fire

There would be so much
life in it
Like a stream it could tell me

where it had been
What other kinds
of love it had known
...