Excerpt from Still Life with Waterfall

DETAIL

I was watching a robin fly after a finch — the smaller bird
chirping with excitement, the bigger, its breast blazing, silent
in light-winged earnest chase — when, out of nowhere
over the chimneys and the shivering front gardens,
flashes a sparrowhawk headlong, a light brown burn
scorching the air form which it simply plucks
like a ripe fruit the stopped robin, whose two or three
cheeps of terminal surprise twinkle in the silence
closing over the empty street when the birds have gone
about their own business, and I began to understand
how a poem can happen: you have your eye on a small
elusive detail, pursuing its music, when a terrible truth
strikes and your heart cries out, being carried off.


AFTER RAIN

See how our big world turns tiny and upside down
in raindrops on thorns of gorse: along the lane
to the small harbour the hedges are empty of leaves
and everything has a flayed, scrubbed look, antique
and about to be new, the brusque wind flailing branches,
declaring change, a change in the weather
that must unsettle us, too, who persist inside its loops
and mazes, unable to see straight, unable to forecast
tomorrow or the day after, only able to remember
what happened: the air scenting to freshness, a sense
of calm coming down, of getting to the other side
of turbulence, of things being touched for once
to wholeness; that somehow nothing bad could happen.


UP AGAINST IT

It' s the way they cannot understand the window
they buzz and buzz against, the bees that take
a wrong turn at my door and end up thus
in a drift at first of almost idle curiosity,
cruising the room until they find themselves
smack up against it and they cannot fathom how
the air has hardened and the world they know
with their eyes keeps out of reach as, stuck there
with all they want just in front of them, they must
fling their bodies against the one unalterable law
of things — this fact of glass — and can only go on
making the sound that tethers their electric
fury to what' s impossible, feeling the sting in it.


SILENCE

The word "consort," poor penny, keeps coming back.
Raising both arms behind her, she kept stroking her neck

and raising her hair up. For coolness. Meanwhile
he went on asking for water, trying to unparch

his charred throat. For what hasn' t been done,
there is this void, a space filled with mourning

in silence, the way an animal or a bird -- not knowing
what it is — will fill a space its own size and outline

in the daily world, and will be every moment all that.
"Soul," as we say, may be something like it, a space

that has shaped itself to the shape of what' s gone
and not returning. Let' s see: should he test all the doors;

will the locks he' s put in place spring open? There is
this distilled thing, gin-light, and the glass is ice.

That, for the moment, takes care of the words. Now
he may sit in silence. He may swallow his tongue.

COLD MORNING

Through an accidental crack in the curtain I can see the eight o' clock light change
from charcoal to a faint gassy blue, inventing things

in the morning that has a thick skin of ice on it,
as the water tank has — so nothing flows, all is bone,
telling its tale of how hard the night had to be

for any heart caught out in it, simple flesh and blood
no match for the mindless chill that' s settled in,
a great stone bird, its wings stretched stiff

from the tip of letter hill to the cobbled bay, its gaze
glacial, its hook-and-scrabble claws fast clamped
on every window, its petrifying breath a cage

in which all the warmth we were is shivering.

Copyright 2002 by Eamon Grennan. All rights reserved.