Faces Recollected Poem by Michael Ó Domhnaill

Faces Recollected



Death- My sheathed acquaintance-

as much friend as any faces.

The flaws of certain peaks and chasms

flout my abysmal wants.



An ebb that trembles-

as a fountain of lead tinged bile-

(strewn with jigsaw scraps

of too many forgone portraits)

woorshes in ecstatic agonized eddies,



Jetsam cloaked as if ants- hoisting the spoils

of memoried mementos made solid

with brain tissue stripped of purpose and utility,

carried by living denizens

to beneath the muck:



Set foot there and be sucked double under

unguent boiling brine

and whirling swallowing sift.



My longed forth and dead friends

are only scraps in foam,

forms and figures

dissolved in an instant,



Like the blood of a

suicide on a sidewalk

washed by rain

to its barest enzymes.