AN RUD A DÚIRT ÉAN BEAG LIOM
( A Little Bird Told Me)

- for David Cooke -

"For a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter."  - Ecclesiastes 10-20

"Oh!" said the bird
" A human who..."

( and I never saw such
a surprised starling )

"...can understand
our language!"

"You can speak!" I blurted out.
"So, I see can you!" gasped the starling.

"The strange thing is...!"
I framed my words carefully

"...we can understand each other!"
the starling finished my sentence.

"But how..?"
being human I had to ask.

"Forget the hows and whys!"
friend starling replied.

"Just relish the moment
the such and suchness of it all!"

I made up my mind
to do so.

"Everything talks if
you only listen!"

the starling continued
its lesson.

"The mountains talk
to the seas continuously!"

The starling so
informed me.

"But humans never ever
(well hardly ever)listen!"

chirped the starling
playfully.

I see it had been listening
to Gilbert and Sullivan.

"And..." the starling went on
it was us birds who taught them!"

I could tell it was proud of
the whole nation of birds.

"Well, I'ill be...!" I sad.
"Yes..." said the starling "...a poet!"

"Poets know the language
of everything"

The starling stated
as if it were a law.

"What the reed in the rushes
told the lake..."

"Or how the sky sees
and says it all..."

Then its feathers trembled
with the change in the air.

"Well, I must fly!"
chuckled the starling.

"Well, well..." boomed the sky
in perfect Blueness.

"Was that a human
I saw you talking to..."

thundered it vastness
dark clouds looming on its horizon.

"Noooo - not me!"
lied the starling

for whatever
reason.

"Hmmm..!" hmmmm the sky suspiciously
"He looked a bit Irish to me!"

"Níl Gaeilge ar bith agam ar chor ar bith!"
stammered the starling.

And the day continued on
talking to Time incessantly.

*

The éan beag that told me all this against the wishes of the sky...was the drud or druideog...the common starling or as in the W.B. Yeats' poem THE STARE'S NEST.

It liked to quote the lines to me in its own charming voice.

"We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty;"

And here was my little stare friend opening my mind out and turning the key.

When caught by the sky telling tales to humans the little fella tries to get out of it by telling the sky "I don't have any Irish at all!" but in Irish. Of course the sky although knowing everything didn't however know any Irish!

I was uncertain of the lines about uncertainty in the Yeats and was trying to remember the Callimachus about people not listening...how a mountain never listens to a sea. And David Cooke when he was staying with us was delighted to find some Greek that he both loved and could indeed read and I thought I betcha David could tell me. But of course not having a David Cooke at hand I stumbled along in these lines and offered up the poem to him.

CROSSING THE BORDER

I smuggle you

despite your death

across Life's borders

here I hide you
between the in-

breath &
the out-

breath

hidden in
the silence

between note &
note

the space between
word and word

death will never find you
again.

INVISIBLE BLUE PLAQUES

Someone or other
lived & died here.

Some other someone
wrote their most

famous work
there.

Every so often
a blue plaque informs us

as we journey
through town

(rain falling down)    

of Blah Blah
who blah’d & blah’d here

or was
blah’d there

... who cares?

In my mind
I ***** invisible
blue plaques

to commemorate
us.

Here: we kissed
(did we not?)    
...a mere minute ago.

Here: we turned
& laughed

on the corner of this everyday
road.

Here: we laughed
& hugged

on a pedestrian crossing

(a pedestrian
crossing)    

whistling at our
ardour

a taxi honking
at our armour.

All over London
our invisible
blue plaques

commemorate
us

&
that

we once
passed this way

so deeply
in love.

"HELLO MR. DEATH AND HOW ARE YOU?"



I felt like a fog
in the shape of a man
a dream walking



a shadow
come alive
never more



alive now
I was
dying



this moment
the most precious thing
I had ever owned



unable
to believe
I was leaving



the sunlight of this
morning behind
me forever






time lay scattered
on the ground
my reflection trapped




in broken bits of mirror
strange that I
would never be




me
ever
again




a cuckoo
( the clock )
not( the bird )



had the last word
I had to
smile...




*



Felt good to cheat my own heart attack..you kinda attack it back with nothing but words and the need to capture it and make it talk.But it's impossible to grasp and poem after poem tries to hold it only for to flow like water between your fingers....like trying to grab hold of a piece of sky and wrestle it to the ground.
Alas my little brother didn't manage to cheat his and the words keep trying to explain this unexplainable fact to my self. I look at the typewriter and it looks back at me...both of us at a loss for words.



"Бог правду видит, да не скоро скажет", as they say in Russian.
Spring had arrived in that Dublin morning...just snuk in when we weren't looking. We were having breakfast and after we would cycle to Eccles Street to see a real house that was lived in by a fictional character. The house was a mere ruin and would soon be knocked down to make way for a new hospital wing.



Time, as it happens, stops when one is dying or rather that particular moment lengthens forever and a second is a century. Mr. L. Bloom's house was in my mind and my hat would later blow off into its basement and I would be as one with the man himself as I lowered myself down to retrieve it...thus entering a chapter in Ulysses. And the fiction was made real.



I had just read Huxley's TIME MUST HAVE A STOP and afterwards thought how ha ha...apt!


I had also come across a 1664 phrase about  buds that "explain into leaves"  which I thought delightful.


I had also came upon a battered copy of Bacon's SYLVA SYLVARUM (  A natural history, in ten centuries. Whereunto is newly added the History natural and experimental of life and death, or of the prolongation of life) which alas would go inexplicably missing and which I would never read to this day.
These are the things that were running through my head when I was going to be dead but...just as suddenly wasn't.


Oh and Tolstoy's GOD SEES THE TRUTH BUT WAITS was ratting about in my mind somewhere so it was going to be a very literary( literally )death!


Each Spring I go back and revisit my death( that wasn't )feeling glad to be just....alive and...in the moment.

SCHRöDINGER'S SOCKS & THE REVENGE OF THE CAT

Schrödinger's cat
failed to see just what

all the fuss was
about?

It was all such
a reductive absurdum.

The cat couldn't understand
collapsing wave functions

decoherence
entanglement or whether

reality was really
quantum

to save its life.

It was aware of
one thing & one thing

only
. . .the diabolic device. . .

Cat in a metal box
with a Geiger counter

with a radioactive substance
blah blah de ****** blah

an atom decaying or something or
other &

releasing a hammer to smash
a phial of hydrocyanic acid.

Wot!

"I do not like thee Dr. Fell!"
thought the cat.

It was a very literary cat.

So all this palaver
about a cat( me? how! )

being both dead or alive or
neither dead or alive or

. . .wot!

So this is to be my great
to-be-or-not-to-be!

Welllll excuse me!
Say...doesn't the cat have his say?

So, I( clever cat that I am)
merely claw my way to the top &

disengage the device
by taking out the hammer.

So no cat was harmed
in the making of this

thought experiment.

It almost drove Schrödinger
out of his tiny little mind!

And he( hee hee )
never did discover

what ever
happened to his socks.

I forever stealing
one sock from a pair

from the open
washing machine.

Leaving him to ponder
just where socks go?

The other side of the Universe?
Oh come on Erwin...it's not

rocket science!

Now, to get back to
describing the behaviour of

a quantum entity.

"Mmmmm......mmmmmm?"

"Naw....I still don't get it!"

"Say ya couldn't see yer way
to giving me a scratch...could ya?"

"Up a bit....upabit....yeah...yeah
. . .there...just...there!"

THE PAST PERSISTS

Dizzy with love
we fall out of the sky

and now the ground
cradling us in its palm

the giddy fun fair
exploding all about us

kisses sticky
as candy floss

we dive into mirrors
changing shape changing shape

our hearts
a helter skelter

strange to have
a body again

even if only
in imagination

us old ghosts
haunting the memories of us

that refuses
to go away

this moment
the Mount Rushmore

of that summer
we were

alive so
alive &

the car crash had yet
. . .to happen.

*

My friend and his wife spent a day at a funfair and went on all the rides...they laughed all the way from swing boats to ghost trains. The day was as sweet and sticky as candy floss. On the way home they crashed and although he barely survived...his wife was killed instantly. He was very guilty for having survived and blamed himself and conflated both events in his mind and his mind kept coming back and going over the events in minute detail. Past and Present were collapsed into the one time of No-time and he was like a living ghost coming back and haunting himself.
He died alas....from his injuries but as I sat with him he kept conflating the events from the fair and the happening of the crash together so that everything happened at the one and the same time.
That's why I thought of them as ghosts revisiting their last moments.
Like the two personages in...Eyes Do More Than See by Isaac Asimov.

CHOCOLATE AND REMEMBRANCE

I killed men
because I wanted to

come back to you
so that I could be

your husband
still..

My enemy too
had someone who

he wanted to
come back to.

I took his life
so that I could go on

with mine.

I had survived
the War

because I wanted to
and because of luck.

Good luck or bad luck
it's hard to tell now.

I see my wife
and see not her

but a woman strewn
like so much *******

in a French village
we slogged through.

She was naked
and had no eyes

where her smile
should be

nothing but
an empty hole.

I go to hold
my little girl

can only see
a girl of three

still burning still
her doll untouched.

An old man
not a man

just a piece of man
a head...a trouser leg.

I killed so that
I could still be me.

But I'm not.

I can never be
me again.

There is an audible line
drawn in the sky

between me
and the me-I-used-to-be.

The war rages on
inside me

and all the dead
come up to me

begging for chocolate
and remembrance

chocolate
and vengeance.