"O, HOW SHALL SUMMER'S HONEY BREATH HOLD OUT""

each hive
a tiny planet
inhabited by bees

the beekeeper
looking for all the world
like a medieval astronaut

"God..." think the bees
coming in a puff of smoke
they fall silent

God takes off his face
throws down his gauntlets
becomes our father

"Good.." grins God
our father
"...that should do the trick!"

we watch the honeycomb
floating in its jar
fantastic as an alien being

the comb hangs above me
most of it drizzles into my mouth
the rest in eyes and hair

when father isn't looking
I put the cage on my face
pretend I'm a fencer

far away in a field
a bee
chatting up a flower

the bees and we all asleep
God's hand and face
a still life on the table

*
I wanted to get it from all perspectives...this simple job of work...from the bee's point of view to the kids to the dad and then the scene when all are tucked up in their beds...even God.

The title of course is stolen from Shakes's Sonnet 65

And of course...the bees...the dad..the kids...this particular summer whose "whose action is no stronger than a flower?" are saved from the might of time by....

O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Alas I am not a beekeeper...this was told to me by a friend remembering growing up with her beekeeper dad as we flicked through her photo album after he was gone...the poem is a bric a brac hodge podge of the things she told me...the things I could see...you might have notice that one of God's hands is missing in the final verse...but that's another story. They were playing boats with the gauntlets in the river by the house and one of God's gloves just got...carried away! Daddy didn't know 'til the next day that one of his beekeeper gloves had gone to heaven and boy there was hell to pay!
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Sonnet 65:
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

THE KIND OF THINGS POETS THINK/DO

all its little life
the triangle longed to be
a circle

"I want to get around!"
it piped up
in its little Isosceles voice

"It's...it's preposterous!"
screamed his mother Scalenely
"...whoever heard of such a thing!"

"You should be proud of your lines!"
scolded its grandpa
Equilaterally

"A triangle can not be..."
said his Papa in a right angled kind of way
"...anything other than a triangle!"

"I always felt I was a circle
trapped inside
a triangle's body!"

one day a passing poet
eavesdropped in an idle moment
on what the lines were saying

"Why ever not...why
ever not" said the poet
poet chaps tend to think like that

so he erased the brave
little Isosceles
drew him again as a circle

"Wheee!"
laughed the former Isosceles triangle
delighting in its circle-ness

this is the kind of things
poets think of...

. . .poets do.



‘Art is nothing but this slow trek to discover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence [your] heart first opened.’

So said Camus...I never forgot my first circle and triangle and dodecahedron . I was sad I couldn't get the dodecahedron into the poem but then a poet is a person of many faces and facets so I guess it gets represented in this symbolic way.

A poet I guess, to be more precise, would more likely be a pyritohedron because it has an irregular pentagonal dodecahedron, having the same topology as the regular one but pyritohedral symmetry while the tetartoid has tetrahedral symmetry.

When one thinks that there are 6,384,634 topologically distinct convex dodecahedra, excluding mirror images—the number of vertices ranges from 8 to 20. (Two polyhedra are "topologically distinct" if they have intrinsically different arrangements of faces and vertices, such that it is impossible to distort one into the other simply by changing the lengths of edges or the angles between edges or faces)one can see the vistas that loom large in the eye of the poet and the choices constructed as stellations of the convex form. It's a kind of...I don't know... geometric degree of freedom with limiting cases ...ahhh you have to do it to understand it really. Now to get back to that Camus feeling about writing and the utter simplicity of the circle and how a triangle forms in the mind...it's a long slow trek.

But then as Nietzsche always was telling me, "Donal..."  he'd be forever saying:

"We have art so as not to die of reality!" or was it "We have art lest we perish from the truth." It was hard to make out his mumblings from under that grand moustache.

"Are you a moustache or a man?" I'd joke back at him.



How lots of things get written...trying to make it interesting for my little girl by "story-ing" so she could take it on board in an imaginative way. Just the simple task of teaching her how to draw circles and triangles by hand and without thought...just the pleasure of Klee's "taking a line for a walk." Not an explanation of mathematical thought...she was only five but a fun way to get her to know how these things form when a pencil wants to draw them...bonky or with a ruler. The story helped push her into knowledge slowly and with ease.

IT WAS A NIGHT WHEN FLIGHT HADN'T YET BEEN INVENTED

He had a face
like a FOR SALE

sign that
had been there for ever

with the kind of moustache
that smart-aleck kids

would draw upon
a poster of the Mona Lisa.

His eyes were kind - Dalí-ish
as when the great painter

announced his
own greatness.

Behind him
a yellow half-moon

posed
perched upon his head

as if it was his
own peculiar particular pet

otherwise he was
nondescript

a no-one
that no one would notice.

An announcement announced
that the flight to Dublin

would be delayed
indefinitely.

Outside the snow was
impossible.

It was a night
when flight

hadn't yet been
invented

and only snow
took to the air.

I only noticed him
because a tear

silently and slowly
trickled down

his left cheek
and hung suspended there

for a century it seemed
before falling on the book

before him
that he wasn't reading

only holding as if
in defence against the world

and I wondered what
his grief was.

*

It was our first Christmas  without our mother and I wanted to be there for my father. But the snow was fearsome and no flights were to be had...you had to go to the airport and stand in line outside the closed terminal to have even a chance to maybe be lucky. After three hours I got lucky and made it home. An old man was sitting on his suitcase and holding a book upside down. pretending to read and crying silently to himself.I was in the same state myself and his grief was the embodiment of mine. Looking up at the darkness as giant flakes of snow fell upon us it was as if we had been transported back to a time when flight hadn't yet been invented and the heavens were inviolate and could not be touched.

IN THE HERON'S EYE

you swim
into yourself
the lake doubles you

your swimming reflection
trying to claw its way
into you

from the lake emerges
a head like a bust then a bust then
the whole delicious nakedness of you

your reflection
hides inside you
when you leave the lake

naked
being chased
by your shadow

the heron's shadow
stares through the water's skin
at the fish within

in the heron's eye
the fish already
- caught

a leaf
floats on the tree's reflection
fish swims amongst its branches

we swim amongst clouds & trees
rain taps on the top of the lake
we laugh underwater

piercing the water's skin
thin blades of sunlight
we swim we swim

COLOURING THE WORLD.

Auntie Peggy...
gave us the world.

We held it tentatively
between finger and thumb.

Hardly able to believe
what we could see.

There we were( & she )
trapped  in the first ever

colour photo we
had ever seen.

And so we saw
that grass was green

as were Uncle Michael's
corduroys.

We looked and looked
again to confirm

that the photo had got it
exactly right.

Somehow that world
was lost by us

and we can only see it
through the eyes of

Auntie Peggy's photos.
where everything remains

just so.

And redder and bluer and greener
than anyone could know

"BALLEA...BALLEA...BALLEA!"
( for Mary Forde )

"Ahhhh howya!" says the sun
looking pleased with the world
it has just constructed

I throw off sleep
& run into the light
the world blossoming into being

here was my favourite tree
that the night had swallowed
& had tried to swallow me

here was a bird
I didn't know
trying to talk to me

I admit I am not
very good
at the bird language

but I catch its drift
get the jist
"Open your eyes...open your eyes!"

the river had somehow
been put back just
in time for the morning

and although the cow
had eaten so much grass
there seemed to be so much more

"Greeeeeen!" sang the grass
at the sky's "Blueeeeeeeee!"
the sky laughs with birds

this my uncle's farm
newly minted out of morning
it sings its song

"Ballea...Ballea...Ballea!"
we chant its name
running out to play

*

Ahhh beloved of places....this is heaven to Curragh Dempseys! This is where the soul will return to if me is still me. This is it on its last legs but Granny's nasturtiums were still blooming and feral cats slunk about the place as if they owned it.

FOLLOW THE LEADER

she is the creator
of worlds
she being 3

does not know how
a world
can be

a world
is only
how she makes it

daily she
creates it
in her own image

music is a thing
that dances
in the blood.

a butterfly is a miracle
she is just as yet
unaccustomed to

a flower
is a piece
of living magic

her dolls
speak to her
( in her own voice)

ten tulips
bow to her
she bows to them

a daddy is
a somebody
who knows nothing

who has to be
taught
everything.

she knows
there is nothing
that can not be

facts are replaced
by imagination
...the art of seeing

a purple sun
shines
in a yellow yellow world

see she has
drawn it so
and so it is so

and I her disciple
follow the little leader
as she teaches me

how to be
the world that she
can see

( half invention
  half discovery )
as she leads

me back to
the land
of childhood

I believed I had
long ago
lost forever

*

She was my teacher...making me in her own image...showing me how I could live in the world without dying into adulthood. I became as a little child and she gave me the gift of the world she created.