My pride pours out on you and I am a desert. You can have all of it. You have.

The vanity of remembrance feints like an open wound.
It is time only, that has helped me to see my self.  It is not truth.
That is untamed and unplottable.

Even I do not belong where I have been, but that is irrelevant. Hush, now.

The feelings pour out, and unmutual.
The effort is worthless. Remark.
Somewhere azaleas trash the ground in pallour.

The more space escapes us, the more deformed I become.
An unpleasant presence in the black of your absence.
If I have ever loved nothing, I have loved.

I am looking for a language that only I know.
How I ruminate on bones.

Richard Grossman said, “There is nothing more terrible than loss, which cannot be measured. Lost loss.”

How do I say, I miss your hands.
How do I say anything?

The slow movement of away may be the calmest and most difficult thing
I have ever endured.

Here is where the oncoming figure knows you.
   We have no realization of time. Of how long
   it will take for us to both decompose. This is
   already a peccadillo. Mirrors brand conclusions.
   The body lets go of its weight like anchorage.
   How I measure warmth is a device that does not
   concern you. Light inches and asks me how soon.
   Already a blunder, an inner life revealed –

Between this carefully studied distance where sometimes
   lines are crossed, a remorse is hoarded, exclusive
   enigmas of hope. Contort this body if you will.
   Between the barely-living and the already gone
   is where I windhover. Sealed shut in hermetic space.
   My desperation becomes a syntax of waiting

and there will be all beautiful horses, and faces in transit
   everytime you pass is an announcement to where
  I cast myself into a miscalculated sonority,
  hauled out of, loosely identified.

'MAKE WORDS BREAK FROM ME HERE ALL ALONE, DO YOU!"
( To G.M.H. my saviour )

Grabbed
by my curls

my face forced
into the toilet bowl

flushed with laughter they
with great glee

*** on me.

This the sacred ritual
of becoming

a First Year
in Secondary.

They hang me up
to dry on a coat rack.

I am an all akimbo
feeble bag of flesh and bones

defenceless nerd.

"Tuttuttut!" they tut
"Reading Hopkins at your age!"

I dangle hopelessly
a helpless broken puppet

their brute bullying
mastering me...Lord!

They tear The Windhover
by Christ...from the Anthology.

Scatter the precious words
in a confetti of hate.

I call on Father Hopkins
to come to my aid and

he gives me
his words.

I speak with all the authority
of his voice.

"I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-  
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding "

"Shhhhh....shushhhh!" they try to shush me
in case Br. Finbar storms out of his cell

like a soutane'd spider
to see such poetry

scrawled in a scream
upon the air.

But I am not for shushing!

"My heart in hiding  
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!"  

"Shhhhhh.....SHHHHHHH!" they now plead.

"here  
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!"

"SHHHHHHH,,,,SGGGGGG!" they beg.

But there is now no
stopping me I

am charged with the grandeur
of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

See, they flee before the glory
of his words.

I fling phrase after phrase after them.
His words chasing them.

"No wonder of it:

shéer plód makes plough down sillion  
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,  
  Fall, gall themselves, and **** gold-vermillion."

Here in Stratford
upon Avon

our love so
(so Shakespearean)      

“...this the very naked name of love...”

& here
upon this
naked hillside

hidden amongst summer’s
long tall grasses

each time
our loving

graced by the presence
of a windhover

as if Gerard Manley Hopkins
blessed our union

sending us this sign

touching us with the beauty
of his lines:


“...a billion times told...lovelier! ”

". . .here
Buckle! AND. . ."



I have( somehow )
escaped( don't ask me how )

the ritual of the head
plunged down the toilet bowl

this the welcome to
secondary school

and flushed
their laughter and their power.

They have bidden their time
well

and although I believe
I have outfoxed them

....they have outfoxed me.

I tremble on my spindly
12 year old legs

surrounded by the sneering
pack.

They hang me from
a coat peg

laughing with great glee
as I try to free

myself
but can't.

I like a living coat
refusing to be clothes.

Then they tear
page by page

my poetry book
to pieces.

Pages like paper bees
crushedcrumpled at my feet.

They make me eat
Hopkins.

I spit him out
gasp for breath.

My tongue rebels AND
I fling Father Hopkins at them.

They recoil in astonished
amazement.

" I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding. . ."

The words sting them
into stunned silence.

This is not
how it should be.

My jacket tears
I fall at their feet

my voice soaring
now above them.

They run from the beauty of the words.

I pick, one by one, up
the fallen pages.

". . . and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and **** gold-vermillion. . ."

The bell rings
for Maths.


*


I was a sickly kid and pretty lousy at school. Told I was not good enough to do the English Higher paper but that didn't stop me reading the stuff. There was a great TV schools programme on that I would tune into and out of this the great Brendan Keneally would walk forth from its tubes and proclaim THE WINDHOVER.
  
With his voice and passion for the poem I was entranced and made a fan of all things Hopkins. Years later I meet him casually at a bar where we happened to be having a pint together. I told him this story and all those years later I had the pleasure of him recite it to me once again in the flesh! It was a magical moment. We batted the lines back and forth to each other and plunged into the beauty of the lines.

The last time before that I had met him and his wife at the Grapevine Arts Centre in Dublin. I was a mere sapling then and just beginning to read poetry aloud. I was a country bumpkin and had to run for a bus and as I ran and as they waved goodbye to me I turned the corner of North Great Georges Street AND....fell on my ****! Oh the shame of it!

I used to belong to a poetry collective that hawked a broadsheet around pubs. My poem CRAZY LONELINESS HIJACKS MEMORY OF A BEAUTIFUL GIRL was the hit of the day and Brendan liked this very much. But my one moment of glory was reciting Hopkins with him in a crowed noisy Dublin poem...I had come full circle.

A POET'S WORK

"Oh my God is...that the time!
12 o'clock and not
a poem in the house written!

quick! wash those adjectives!
quick! bathe those verbs!
feed those nouns!

have you adverbs gone back to bed?
come on 'Smile!'
like a simile!

noooo! don't
wear the same metaphors
you wore yesterday

aghhhhhhhhhhhhh!
and so with a little playful
smack on its btm

the poem is sent
out into the world.
'See ya...be good'

a poet's work
is never  ever
done!"


*


As a child I was sick and poorly and often missed school so that I found myself at home with me Ma and doing all the Ma things that she had to do....I followed her about the house helping out and seeing what an amazing myriad of things she had to do in order to make our life run like effortless clockwork only I found out it wasn't so effortless.

"Dónall son....!" she'd yell from the bedroom amidst sweeping and bed changing and making....will you cut the potatoes for the chips love!" And from bedroom to kitchen we would sing all the Ray Charles we knew.

She would always say the same thing like a little work mantra...
"Jaysus...oh Holy Jaysus....12 o'clock and not a child in the house washed!" And a whole litany of things yet to do. These were like well worn beautiful pebbles being rounded and smoothed in a stream of language....I loved hearing them even for the thousand time! So I cross pollinated all her mad cap hell for leather sayings into this making of poems poem to get the same urgency for tidying up my brain and getting the words washed and up and out making signs upon a page so that other brains could decipher my thoughts.

On one of these being my mother days I was watching "Telefís Scoile" RTE's educational prog. when up popped poet Brendan Kennelly. Now despite only starting my secondary education I was reading all around me so I was reading the Leaving Cert. poems as well. I was having a hard time with Hopkins but then Brendan started to recite The Windhover in his lovely Kerry accent and I at once understood it as the music of his mouth brought the words to life in glorious sound that I at once fell in love with and it splashed against my mind like a wave breaking over the headland that was my tiny mind. It was an epiphany.
Years years later I met Brendan in a pub having a quiet pint by himself at the bar and I went up to him to tell him of this moment made glorious for me by him and Hopkins. So he started to recite it for me again after all this time.

"I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin,"
And I said the next bit.....
"dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding;
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! "
And then he...
"then off, off forth on swing,"
And we traded lines until we had completed the Hopkins.
And then he said: "Well wil ya...have a pint?"
And I said: "I will...so I will!"

And then he said he loved my CRAZY LONELINESS HIJACKS MEMORY OF A BEAUTIFUL GIRL. And I said: "What! Ya still remember that!" And he said:" 'deed I do!" And so I recited it for him. It was so I felt I had come into my poethood!