Excerpt from Relations: New & Selected Poems

FENCEPOSTS
Inside each of these old fenceposts
fashioned from weathered boughs and salt-bleached branches
(knotholes, wormy ridges, shreds of bark still visible)
something pulses with a life that lies outside our language:
for all their varicose veins and dried grain lines,
these old-timers know how to stand up
to whatever weather swaggers off the Atlantic or
over the holy nose of Croagh Patrick to ruffle
the supple grasses with no backbone which seem
endlessly agreeable, like polite, forbearing men
in a bar of rowdies. Driven nails, spancels
of barbed wire, rust collars or iron braces-the fenceposts
tighten their grip on these and hang on, perfecting
their art and craft of saying next to nothing
while the rain keeps coming down, the chapping wind
whittles them, and the merciless sun
just stares and stares: yearly the shore is eaten away
and theyll dangle by a thread until salvaged
and planted again in the open field, which they bring
to an order of sorts, showing us how to be at home
and useful in adversity, and weather it.


PAUSE
The weird containing stillness of the neighbourhood
just before the school bus brings the neighbourhood kids
home in the middle of the cold afternoon: a moment
of pure waiting, anticipation, before the outbreak of anything,
when everything seems just, seems justified, just hanging
in the wings, about to happen, and in your mind you see
the flashing lights flare amber to scarlet, and your daughter
in her blue jacket and white-fringed sapphire hat
step gingerly down and out into our world again
and hurry through silence and snow-grass
as the bus door sighs shut
and her own front door flies open and she finds you
behind it, father-in-waiting, the stillness in bits
and the common world restored as you bend
to touch her, take her hat and coat from the floor
where shes dropped them, hear the live voice of her
filling every crack. In the pause
before all this happens, you know something
about the shape of the life youve chosen to live
between the silence of almost infinite possibility and that
explosion of things as they are-those vast unanswerable
intrusions of love and disaster, or just the casual scatter
of your childs winter clothes on the hall floor.


WOMAN AT LIT WINDOW
Perhaps if she stood for an hour like that
and I could stand to stand in the dark
just looking, I might get it right, every
fine line in place: the veins of the hand
reaching up to the blind-cord, etch
of the neck in profile, the white
and violet shell of the ear
in its whorl of light, that neatly
circles strain against a black
cotton sweater. For a few seconds

she is staring through me
where I stand wondering what Il'l do
if she starts on that stage of light
taking her clothes off. But she only
frowns out at nothing or herself
in the glass, and I think I could,
if we stood for an hour like this,
get some of the real details down. But
already, even as she lowers the blind,
shes turning away, leaving a blank

ivory square of brightness
to float alone in the dark, the faint
grey outline of the house
around it. Newly risen, a half moon
casts my shadow on the path
glazed with grainy radiance
as I make my slow way back
to my own place
among the trees, a host of fireflies
in fragrant silence and native ease
pricking the dark around me
with their pulse of light.

Copyright 1998 by Eamon Grennan. All rights reserved.