perhaps the strangest lachrymosity
accompanied by elephants with blue
crackling about them

one marvels but can hardly feel
in the field they create

.

Six young men and a woman. Sixteen line sonnet.

With some discomfort travailing down the mechanism
of framing not failing to notice in passing how the bilberry
fronds (vb) at the wayside one has concern for—engineering
for the human armature which carries with some instability

to a place slightly—hallowed where she now stands
slightly—awkward in the presence of at least six ghosts
for more are evident in her [country ways] and about her. These
spirit things walk with her in her harrowed life, and one

would reach out quivering across all of time, with urgency
to touch her somehow, to brush them away, to say at last
that this (here, now, again) is what there is, and it must be enough
to sustain her, to lift her from that deep place, to allow her

to feel the waterfalls which flood softly here. This then
is the compact made flesh of negative ions, of potential,
finally, sanctified in this watery and electric place, of love.

I understand and I wish to continue.

.

Keeping love and its deep monster as pets.

In some areas like breath or sex or design
once achieved like the Estwing hammer
the wheel or the loaf, originality has little virtue
now, and one should celebrate the very fact
of being an ancient cliché in one's feelings
in one's ardour and behaviour, of being hugely
referenced in a million pre-emptive poetries
able to find oneself in the old and the very old
and the not very old, and to know

that you didn't invent this, neither the feelings
nor the manifestation. You got it from all
of history, from something that gathered
like a god in the escalating momentum
of what it is to be human. When the current
is right, you go with it, and you don't make a fuss
or wish for a new current. Every day is new.

An ancient miracle is a miracle each time it happens
to crack the ice around you, monster.

.

America: it's like watching
a brain-damaged child
punching its own face
again and again

.

the night's travel

in and now out the same door
like all knives whirling
our utter politics in collisions
of limestone pavements

across all this she travailed
with sepia sandbags
of County Clare

all sailroads to traverse
and only 8 O-clock
by the whale's chime

this big hand by the night's wild travel
points to 12
the little hand
flickers and stops

iris of heart attack hope
—love of small things
and wild places

be certain now be sure

it's that time
in between
where the hands don't count

it's okay to be scared here
to lie down and breathe
to lie a little
before waking



(Published in PoetrySZ 2009)