Before the stormy night they stand
The empty buildings high and grand
Windows black and diamond plated
The stars about their glassy faces

Monoliths and moonlight kissed
All tightly packed against the winds
Freezing stone and white as bone
Alight along the rainy roads

And further still the swirling hills
Receive the heavens overhead
Some mighty tryst, an inky rush
From here I watch them touch

Coffee alone is a moment of mine,
An oval mug served by a girl with a smile
Dark coloured drips coming down at the sides..
crashing through time, like gas giants catching the light

And raging outside is the storm in it's tracks
Tall windows spare us the blustery flak
Moored for a moment we are comfortably sat
Our ghostly reflections are a film upon glass

The oversized doors made from panels of oak
From somewhere behind open heavy and slow,
for another akin
The creak of the wood as they let themselves in

Disturbing the hallowed and candlelit quiet
Turning the heads of the practicing pious
We are shook from a dream
By the rushing of wind through this place of esteem

An ocean away in Colwyn bay,
a glamorous stranger is looking my way
tilting her head and lifting her shades,
her furrowing features are meeting my gaze

Shamelessly eyed from a platform away
As if she had something important to say
Then turning around with a curious frown,
she starts back towards her familiar town

To elegant houses of ashlar and brick
A terrace of Gothic adornments and frills
Victorian angles and white window sills,
becoming the specks which are dotting the hills

A town held aloft by a battered plateau
and anchored to ocean by columns of stone
A picturesque coastline, a spring getaway
The home of a stranger, her postcard landscape

The rattle of metal and the wheels over rails
The men wearing colours are starting to wave
My thoughts turning back to that taciturn dame
The din of the train means I'm pulling away

Above the silhouettes of pines,
with needled edges blown and wild
Heroes collide!
Virgins and damsels are frozen in stride
Together by inches they turn in the sky

And brilliant the moon in her loftiest place
Diana's face aloft in space - and under her eye,
mahogany tables set out in the night,
wearing her light

Draped in her rays are the myriad faces,
Strangers in pairs and amid conversations
In gestures and signs and in whispers and mimes
Their stories take flight - I'm enthralled by their
tales uttered into the night

Here where the pines are as tall as the sky
Where the moon will forget all our faces
If I had their ear or if I had their graces
I would share in their solemn and secretive phrases

My hands over handles and the studded upholstery
Reflective and cold as the strangers come close to me

Swaying like passengers stood on a boat
I'm fleetingly heartened by the accents I know

Picking them out of the bullying crowds
We're hurrying past unfamiliar towns

The streetcorners, bridges and shops that they know
Serenely suffused by a summery glow

The picturesque places they lazily go,
like postcards or paintings delivered back home

I'm rolling on by their entire other lives
Their lot on my mind and to them unbeknownst

Like a rousing of wind which as suddenly goes
For a moment we had almost been close

As like when they were children
now they curtsy at the cross
Then all once they take their seats
and turn their gaze upon

The august priest in silken robes,
ornately trimmed and white
And urging them to prayer between the
readings and the rites

The man of god, his hands aloft
move practiced through the air
His winsome words bring ease upon
the crosses which they bear

His mirthful moans and dulcet tones
resounding through the chamber
By candlelight I then decide
To stay for the remainder

On high and in whole looms a glimmering globe
On a mountain of cloud, on her wintery throne
Diana every man has known

From there she casts her ashen glory
Upon my buildings highest storey
From there and paired with stars in tow
She maps the routes and lights the roads

Beyond black trees all sharp and blown
Through feral fields for miles untold
How she bridges their breadth without effort or labor
How I envy pallid plains set all alight beneath her favor

Oh winter how soon you will leave me
How soon you'll bereave me
And though I'll remember your seasonal sights,
your evergreens and birches converging for miles
These things are not nearly enough
I want us to touch

To fashion you into some tangible thing
Some newlywed's ring, attached to a finger
That I may look down and remember you – winter

While somewhere yule-ash is being spread in the fields
That the old gods might hasten their yields
Or kept beneath pillows to silence a storm
I will lie beneath virgo, a lover forlorn

Before the night comes cold and proper
When set against a fiery sky
The crooked limbs of a naked poplar
Have stirred a romance in my mind

And swaying with their kin and kind
My heavy heart asway in kind
Those wooden spines so hale and hearty
Like will-'o-wisps they'll soon depart me

Far beyond the gable ends of dark suburban streets
Riding past the furthest flats where paths give way to fields

Where giant cranes with groaning frames are elevators into space
Looming over dark estates, unoccupied and halfway built
A regiment of vacant digs

Set out just like theatre props; a sort of play not yet begun
The porches laid with welcome rugs for when the future tenants come

And when they take up residence and get their keys and pay their rent
They'll surely never think of me as I have thought of them
The countless nights I've seen to spend, exploring every lamplit bend

Or how I'd trekked those distant places, before they'd laid the first foundations
Beyond the reach of tired feet, where fauns or fairies surely meet

The dark and curing plains are real and stretch for starry miles around
The rustle and din of windblown things, the rush of moonlit clouds

And soon from now when strangers come and pick the perfect house to live
And make it theirs and settle in and pick a room to put the crib
I'll stop the squeak of spinning wheels upon some distant mound or cliff
And moving closer to the lip; Dublin twinkles past the tip

Between the blacks of bending trees
I meet the moon at in betweens
I glimpse her glories, wild and worn
Aglow atop a stirring storm

Oh breathing birches blown about
Beneath her silver silence
Beyond the fields I farthest see
Along the dark horizon

There the hymns of heavy winds
Beyond the blown and gloomy leas
Where ghostly grass and rushing reeds
Dance darkly 'round my falling feet

Tall and shadowed is the man from behind
We'd follow the prints of his footsteps in kind

Through bramble and briar to our chest, to his knees
The brown and suede boots we would follow under trees

Guitar bags and candles and his things around the house
Strange metal trinkets which made strange metal sounds

The kisses with my mother before they never kissed again
And his father too,
whom I met in the street and awkwardly embraced
Love comes in lulls and in spates

From where I'd watched the roses blown
Their bodies bent and brightly doused
Their forms aroused in wiry crowds

Petals pink upon a breeze
are thrown about the golden eve
Such a fabulous flock, how I envy their flight!
How I covet their course, sailing into the night

The frost-feathered birches are a heavenly white,
knuckled and rigid as elderly spines,
Holy as naves and as filled with esteem
November announces my season of dreams

Long nights south to the tree and the lake
For happiness sake, and lying with stars
The comforting sounds of a million cars
Rubber on tar, rubber on tar

Flights of romance and my supper outside
A tangle of shadows fiercely flailing at my sides,
and over tables of oak
I am sat near silent others in their scarves and winter coats

They accompany me so, although none by invite
We are strangers breaking bread beneath a milky way of lights

Here where lofty leagues above, the storm begins to croon
Where fleecy clouds in motion seem to overtake the moon

Littered and black along glittering paths
How you shake them from sleep
How you suddenly sweep aside loitering leaves

How you throw them aloft, like some fluttering flock
How you set them to flight!
How you hurry them off, to the wintery night.

The din of winter is a window away
I've come here to stay at my Grandmother's
The bedroom aglow in her yellows and reds
The lamp by the bed

Beckoned by hands and a magical timbre
I'm starting towards her in answer,
recalling her manner
Her habits preserved as in amber

Sat by her side and embracing her then
I'm suddenly a child again,
her eighty-two years to my ten

A mother of two and her children in tow
The three of them dressed for the perishing cold
An afternoon trip!

Her children never walk, but they run and they skip!
And I in their midst - the opposite sides of a
red-painted bridge

Here in the dusk while the light falls away,
comes the night in it's wake
I am wrapped in the nothings of a wintery gale

At my neck and my ear rush it's wintery song
I am coldly embraced, although never for long

Here where the roads harbour hardly a soul
Where the bramble and the briars are frozen and blown
Here where the rains move in curtains of silk-
curtains of light, beating and beating at the edges of night

Here where the pines in their thrashing and throes
In their fits and their starts and their sea-sounding odes..
..they are after my heart, they are leaning and thrown
beneath arctic white stars

When ills and ails have ceased and summered
I'll wander widely, unencumbered
In my body through those golden streets
And gold the higher half of trees

How often I dream of that sudden restoring
Of boldly exploring places farther afoot
Those redolent roads where I'd carried my love,
where our words had been said
Where some later day I will wander far again

Terrible and tall are the trunks in their ranks,
and reeling en masse
Like a timber-toothed maw guarding secrets

Where in that darkness do the rushing leaves go?
At my feet and in song!
With each bluster they usher the bedlam along

For what do they long?
For what within that writhing wood might turn them so headlong?

In little leaps and sudden swerves, they trace the winds across the turf
Such a dance on the Earth!
Such a rapturous throng!
Towards that crooked forest where my heart is darkly drawn

Through gaps in the trees I can see Dublin's pier
The Poolbeg stacks are surprisingly clear
Striped and remote, their billowing clouds
are a silvery choke

Here where the roads aren't routes that I know
They are comforting so and offer some bearing
I am followed on high by that pairing

Towers over buildings, towers over pines
Those two yonder towers are the most
on my mind

Here where the leaves are dramatically red,
quietly falling and littering bends
Here where the birches are a heavenly white,
those two yonder towers are the most on my mind

No rest till I'm dwarfed by those towering twins
No rest till I'm flush with the deafening drink
There a horizon and sparingly strewn,
with buoys and boats; sitting strange in the gloom

I wish to know, where blizzards blow
And bring their snow without me
To know the night beyond the light
Of cities, dark and downy

Those solemn spaces, old and wild
With hoary fields asway
Where trees are darker than the sky
Where everlong I'd stay

I wish to tread, like ashes spread
Some buoyant body brought along
While diamonds glitter overhead
And I amidst their starry throng