Over the Boundaries (4 page)

Only the needle you plied

Was more dagger or lance

That worked through flesh and bone.

I saw the pain, the crossed features wrought,

And from the heat of that summer noon

Returned to leave with you

The largest portion of the loaf.

Time it was of dying,

Of going nowhere,

Heart set on no great hope

And hand scarcely sought its complement

In the comfort of another.

‘You should not be so sad,’

Words thrown as a lifeline perhaps,

The Outsider and Albert Camus,

Andre Gide and L’Immoraliste,

Joni Mitchell and Blue,

One smiling, distant face

On the edge of the grave

I, or someone else had dug.

We are dying still

Though to life at last:

Man that didn’t trust the heart of man

And by his cruelness broken,

Is now the port of call

And the fullness of fruit yielded in season.

The college doors are closed behind us, harbouring

Like hidden treasure our dreams in that past.

Leafy walks and long avenues — protectors

Of the lone soul’s sighing — now echo the footfall of a

step.

Coffee rooms where we sat whole mornings and

Afternoons away now host another generation.

All is lost to us of that time save in memory

Where, forever fixed, we move in silent scenes

That live and will not yield their mystery.

Where light was standing on a dark stairs

By a door that opened on your face

And touch was meeting by the steps in winter

When you were silent, taut and cold,

Where love was leaving on a sunny day

By a road you saw but never came.

Now I am still and you are wandering —

A child in some lost land, I hold these jewels

In my hand, my soul forever turning

In their first light, my heart a prisoner still

Of a past that has so freely flown and gone by the arches.

I saw you as you passed,

Our eyes locked, rocked in the flicker

Of dawning recognition and you were gone.

I sat by the lake, silver whispering beech

Sighing in my ears. From the thick, green,

Pliant limbs of trees, a girl with laughing eyes

Came forth, her dancing body as innocently,

Ignorantly thrust in ever-shifting,

Deep, melodious harmony.

Come with me to the inner room

That is not wholly an entry into the past

Nor yet a leap into the journey’s end,

Neither a respite from the present task,

But a falling out of time,

A place of battle where you came

And I assailed the ghosts of mind,

Beating against the ridges into the dark,

Undiscovered valleys of your soul,

Where I lay down to give, to lose again

And in your arms victor lie

Like some ship come in laden with merchandise.

Let me live in the invisible spaces,

In the untried places of your heart

And not try to conquer or bring down

Shrines and monuments to love,

Rotten as an old fruit.

‘All is vanity and decay,’

An old line thrown away

And meaningful still

While love waits in the wings.

I will live in the invisible spaces,

In the untried places of your heart

And wait for love to be born again.

The world is like a wave

That greets me each new morning

With greater or lesser force.

And some days it doesn’t touch me at all -

I watch its waves break

On the golden shoreline of my heart,

From where I lie, safe in my retreat with you.

Our bodies now apart,

The tears softly roll down my cheeks

For the love and times

You and I did not know

In the desert days and years

You left me in a winter of winters

When our love was young.

I struggled with the waves,

Struggled with the weeds,

I turned with the wind.

Then you came,

Yearning for what had been.

Indebtedness all round,

The law of love transgressed,

Perfect love-offering on a tree

For all, once and eternally, made manifest.

Some at the foot stand aghast,

Some mock while others walk past,

Surmising still, their hour not yet come.

Babylon the great whore, meanwhile,

Sinks lower and ever lower,

Surfeiting on the blood of the prophet

And the innocent. Many wander

This way and that suffering from a famine

Not of bread but of the hearing the word of God.

Language is just the names we use to identify

The things we see — bush, robin,

In the act of greeting what is, what exists

In our field of experience, waiting

For what is to be made manifest still

Through earthly and heavenly signs

And in our own hearts.

And there is no need to feel ashamed

Or be afraid to name the Trinity of being,

The Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

Or to believe that nobody wants to hear

The word of truth issuing from the mouth

Of the man or woman of God.

It was not unlovely or unloved,

Despoiled now of the rose roundness

It once possessed.

The forehead, pale as a plain

The desert winds had whipped across,

Stretched high above a gaze

That bore out fixed and straight

From a hollow place

Never to be retrenched or lost.

It had not grown old, just changed;

Fled the flush of child delight

Leaving a stranger look in its stead

In the nose that pointed to another time,

The lips, neither parted nor fixed,

Trusting, anticipating yet

A fulness sure to come.

It was your face in mine,

A light reflection in the cheekbones drawn,

With wave on wave of thought

And new sounds in the old

Rising this way and that

Ever looking for a diadem or crown.

For Tom Kane

Spring wasn’t complete until you came -

Then the meadows danced with the promise of brighter

days,

Young dandelions and daisy-heads closing in tight knots

In the grass where I walked that late spring afternoon.

Thoughts of parousia, deserts turning to fertile ground

And of you, relative stranger tto our race, turned

harbinger,

Leader in eternity’s immeasurable time-frame,

Bearing a torch-light down history’s dusty, obfuscated

ways.

Can’t remember where or how we met —

We were travelling the same road,

Came out of the same darkness, I guess.

As we walked, people all around,

Words were the key that unlocked the door

Beyond the issues that distract

Like group unrest, nuclear attack.

Reluctant to interpose some remark

Between us and the light leading on,

We drifted in love, sometimes close,

Sometimes apart.

You greeted the ones you had left,

Then intimated where I was to sit —

By you with the band.

In the shifting sands of sleep,

Separated a space,

I turned to find

Your eyes lift from my face.

God is good, God is good -

A bird flew into the sun

Below the bright wood —

Lets his people live in peace

When all is said and done

When all is said and done.

God is good, God is good.

Birds were singing by the river

Below the bright wood:

Reach for love above and beyond

What you can hold,

Grasp truths half-understood.

God is good, God is good.

Children in the garden, running,

Below the bright wood:

See in their excited faces the pink flush

Of victory, ‘Look Mammy, light for you

And me, for us all, we are free.’

My life is like the brushstrokes of an artist —

Painted pinks and greys across a canvas

Of early autumn sky.

I am colour in your hands

And silence too

The wind and rustling leaves fill up

Before the onset of rain.

I will let go

And watch love take shape

In the good things that you give —

Dawn and the soft sweet chirpings

Of the swallows’ late brood.

For Ailbhe

You came of age to-day and,

Suddenly, wherever you moved or fell

Love was there to guide you —

Books, chocolates, cards

And promises of further treats,

A grown-up’s need to compensate

For the departed childhood years

Or was it for something achieved?

Your quick denial when I spoke —

Would you prefer to be six?’ —

told me you had assumed the cloak,

‘It took too long to be this,’ you said.

Later, much later, I had a truth to tell —

I came of age that day as well.

‘Happiness in love,’

the river sang.

‘And sweetness too,’

the cowslip smiled.

Drenched in the sun’s

Irradiating light:

‘End all bounds,

All obstacles to love.

Melt our hearts,

Our souls confound.’

‘Let there be symmetry,

Order from above,’

the delicate-fringed fern stood

In mute assertion of the plan.

And to the words,

‘Will we be found

Again as one?’

Echoes answering,

Unanswered rang.

A time and a time and a half-time,

Before the sun’s finite light

Shone suspended in the darkness,

The essence and fulfilment of desire,

I am,

The eye of beauty in me beholds

All wondrous, manifold shapes

Of beast and every living thing,

All perfume of flower;

The cup of life

Filled to overflowing

In my love held forth

To willing hearts and steadfast souls.

We have seen the glory of the sun

And sported in her golden light

But lately have seen that glory fade

As the chill winds of autumn after summer days.

Look to the topmost leaves

Dried golden against the sky,

Borne to the season’s fulness of colour

In vibrant reds, dull yellows and brown.

Look to the hairs of your head

Numbered much more than these.

Why worry that most branches do not grow straight

Or are stunted, cut off in mid-course. Look up to me,

Risen above the things that hurt — selfish ambition,

Stubbornly pursued, ends in the dust.

Flesh of my flesh, child, why grieve

That you are not loved as I love you

And that some go down, mocked, misunderstood,

The way I went, faithful and true.

I give you apricot skies

And teddybears’ chairs,

Swallows’ wings and the tips

Of all proven things.

Bending to ever raise,

Waiting at the door, lingering,

You plead and plead

For the oneness yet to be achieved.

Yellow Mississippi moon,

Red moon behind the Galtees

Or rising over Lough Gur.

I mull over words,

‘new moon, old moon faces’

And marvel at the dream

Where child in the full moon

And old man in the new

Circled round, at one and the same time,

Both prisoner and free.

From the cool, cold waters of the Atlantic

To the tropics of the East China Sea,

From the lush pastures of the Golden Vale

To the desert and scrub of Sinkiang,

I watched the dark form emerge,

Weave a winding path to me from the shadows,

It was my own soul or was it man,

Found and lost, lost and found again.

From the hardened antler tips and the wooden-tipped

spears

In the caves of Chou-K’ou-Tien

To the piercing light in the graves at Newgrange,

The legacies of countless civilizations before me —

The dynasties of Shang, Chou, Hansung —

Nothing haunts like the fall of one man,

Love seeps in the narrowest crack,

Binding all up, making all whole again.

Dark-smudged leaves, trembling branch,

Tree silhouette in shan shiu form

Looms large as life on my cell wall

Where a young dissident mourns.

Night of the wounded, dying, massacre in Tiannanmen …

Crushed in the iron fist of oppression

Some won’t see their forty years,

Much less live out their lifespan.

And, one among the teeming millions,

From chains unsung set loose,

Cut to the heart by this travesty of love,

Urgent lurchings of the marriage bed,

In gift of vision and love unprecedented I found

Cell-rich semen, hallowed DNA,

All bathed, purged, in the luminous glow

And free flow of his bright red blood.

I struggle in shallow waters

To keep myself afloat;

With deliberate action he dives into the deep,

With rythmic motion swims the breaststroke,

Then heaves his body half from the water,

Weight of soul in broad tanned back

Resting on the pole.