LIMBO LINES
(Versions of ‘Línte Liombó
from the Irish of Seán Ó Ríordáin)
LIMBO LINES
BROWN EYES
LOCAL MUSIC
THE COMPANY OF FOOLS
IN THE CHAPEL
UNDERWATER STONES
A PERSON HAS GONE OUT OF LIFE
THIN WOMAN
CHANGE
WILL
HAVING LEFT HIM IN THE POUND
FORM
MOONLIT
LIGHT
LIFE IN DEATH
TOIL
HOWEVER HIGH THE MOON
TO MY FRIENDS
ME
DON’T WAIT
LIMBO LINES
Dear to me, the lines
I had to put aside
when they jumped to the fore
to be part of a poem.
Others are now shaped
at a desk, officiously,
and no place for the discards
in any collection.
How do I know they weren’t the ones
that would best plead the cause,
that would best put me into
what was to be said?
But I launched other envoys
to argue their own case
as if the original
were lacking proper merit.
If I’d kept faith with those
I’d had to refuse,
is it I or my other
I’d see in the mirror?
BROWN EYES
Her brown eyes, these in her son’s shell.
A touch of loveliness, her eyes descending on you,
a privileged contact with her body and mind.
Brief a thousand years caught in her gaze.
Strange to see him occupy those eyes,
embarrassing to face her since she became a man.
How could I know, when they were hers, those woman’s
eyes would one day be mannish, deep,
where find a greater cause of confusion,
how must I change my speech to match them now?
She wasn’t the first to look with them,
nor will he be, I think, the last.
Is this a taste of our eternity,
that our portion wends
from mother to son to mother,
each opposite engendered?
LOCAL MUSIC
He heard the music in the talk of Dún Chaoin,
not the words but the music that travels
through the speech and taste of Munster,
the music a stranger hears;
local music the speakers don’t hear,
music I never heard
because of its closeness to me,
and I haltered by its vigour.
Music heard yet in Munster, even
in places where the dialect is abandoned.
THE COMPANY OF FOOLS
It’s hard to be alone on your own,
a calling too high, too narrow,
a beckoning to madness.
Easier to be alone in a crowd;
wherever you are, you’re alone,
gravely escorting yourself,
what matter any company
but your pitiless own: a crushing
falsehood any other
on your drumming road of truth.
IN THE CHAPEL
Hear my entreaty and take back
the thought I lost on my way in,
there was a priceless mystery there
and if I don’t reclaim it, it will be lost.
Its music ever since in my heart.
It didn’t grow overnight, though it came promptly,
but knowledge which was sifted from all my life;
if I had it again, I would get a rope
to bind it tight, or I’d be of little worth.
The speed of its music in my heart.
It would beckon words with the proper gesture,
only the strong would respond,
it would sense its image precisely
and be ransomed by words into flesh.
Its dew fell into my heart.
Lord, I entreat you, let it return,
the thought I lost on my way in.
Its music a sorrow in my heart.
UNDERWATER STONES
A golden autumn afternoon,
bare limbs on the beach,
bellies and limbs sprouting
from spotted swimsuits
revealing the human shape
unhidden but the core –
their skins pale confessions:
all but one black toddler, skin sparkling
like stones in shallow water,
brighter than what there was of white,
that golden autumn afternoon.
A PERSON HAS GONE OUT OF LIFE
A person has gone out of life.
She went this morning after five;
the colour straightway left her cheek
and her features started marbling;
as if on orders from her Maker,
they stood to attention publicly,
a rigid soldier made of each,
beauty among them spreading thin.
The last collection of this woman’s
features published on a board,
her skeleton bound in a habit,
the business editorially cold.
I see her making for heaven as if astray,
blinded by the light, this life still in her eyes,
tangled in words which are now receding,
eternity in her grasp, she slow to grasp it.
THIN WOMAN
I passed one evening a thin
woman sitting on a ditch.
I greeted her, she me,
between us mere inches
But near as she was, no further
was bald Conan Mac Morna
and all that unfamiliar crew
evicted from their storied home.
She couldn’t be reached to speak to,
hidden in frozen words;
if she ever felt her mind
in bloom, you’d never know it.
I yielded to her, and answered
in her native foreignness,
acknowledging the gap between us
no wider than competing species.
CHANGE
Change her cat-shape
in your mind to a woman
and you’ll see
that she’d be a fine woman
and you a tomcat.
WILL
It had to happen. It couldn’t be avoided.
No blame on me because of it.
Since Adam in the Old Law laid eyes on Eve
the end forever of my avoiding it.
Since that mistake in the garden of Paradise
the stain travelled until my thought happened.
I would have preferred – though I was unheeded –
to remain in a void than turn into a person.
Who could listen or consent to my wish
and I only a thing that was never a thing?
But they’re not the same, a never-born nothing
and the nothing to be born after a nothing-term.
Was I thought of in my forebears’ conception?
Was I a thing before lodged in the womb?
I was willed by the Will that wills all,
who has willed all wills and all to come.
Without consent of my will. I couldn’t refuse:
refusal of will is a will in itself.
If I say something and it’s not I who says it,
I can’t listen, not having the voice of the Will.
When it chooses to speak, this voice of the Will
travels throughout and through the world.
Each thought through me, that thought is the Will’s,
my task to carry it whole to birth.
I am only a cell of the body of my forebears
and the body must live when the cell is exhausted;
I am only a deed willed by the Old Law
which will deed on when I have been shrouded.
It can’t be remedied. The harm is done.
I must live with my kind in the midst of others.
HAVING LEFT HIM
IN THE POUND
Greyhound, don’t grieve tonight.
You always welcomed life, your bark
the most generous welcome I had
though I was the one put an end to it.
Greyhound, you’re alone now
if beast you are and not a shade;
waiting the final wound
among unfeeling foes.
Your hound-heart big, incapable
of anything but love
for those who’d let you down –
only a vagrant hound.
But you wore a house-dog’s habit,
wildness in decline; tonight
nothing of your love of running
but my heart in racing anguish.
FORM
Everything that comes
goes away and comes back
and our first glory returns;
and a ripe man does
as he did as an infant:
in store, a renewal of youth.
When a child is born
there is no going back;
everything to be is born.
And if at times we go
from ourselves, wishing
an other in our shape,
we return empty
from every journey,
ever sealed with our first form.
MOONLIT
However cloudy the sky tonight,
a full moon, an eye of light
is washing: its place
in the sky is at war –
declared by light on darkness –
and as far as is in its power
this destruction of light widens, darkens.
In this twilit place are wide mountains
and tracts of ocean
and distant sunsets
eaten by light from darkness.
The lusts of tragedy are in
the unbearable beauty of these lit places.
We’d rather it be hidden,
this sudden beauty;
there is no roadway to its breast,
no shape or power in it;
it’s swallowed by a cloud
as I am by the house.
LIGHT
Night fell bit by bit
until everything was gone,
bright and black equally black,
chairs lost their shape,
the room concealed,
blackness swallowed every shape.
In the womb of darkness is a world,
I cannot touch it with my hand,
all’s left is memory in a mind
too slothful to re-create.
I lit, and with a start the room
was reborn in my eyes,
chairs jumped out of the black,
sun rose behind my fingers,
light made a world.
I switched it off, and all died,
my two hands and all
the eyes made live before.
When my light is fully gone
a world will be left whole, intact,
but wholly gone.
LIFE IN DEATH
She died last year,
her features legible;
she no longer woman nor man
but a cold thing she surrendered,
she now where she was laid,
a living grave.
TOIL
Without the cruel prop of toil,
how can the fallen stand
bone-naked in the middle
of his terrifying mind?
HOWEVER HIGH THE MOON
There is no fly, no moth, no bee
God-made; no woman, man
whose fate doesn’t concern us.
No passing interest is allowed,
no excuse of nerves;
no person in the valley of the mad
by whose side we shouldn’t sit,
alongside whom we shouldn’t walk
as they carry our ills in the mind.
There is no place, hedge, bush,
however remote; no stone
be in north, south, east, west,
whose situation doesn’t call
on our concern and sympathy;
however far South Africa,
however high the moon,
they are a proper part of us:
no place on the face of the globe
in which we were not born.
TO MY FRIENDS
You make me sick, and no wonder;
your self-conceited talk,
your authoritative opinions,
your support for all things petty,
stand for the unjust hold
the strong have on the weak
today and for thousands of years;
the shadow of falsehoods
you still promulgate; your faith
in the name of the Christ you’ve ruined.
I will fight you to the death
even though you are my friends
because I hear the high echo of your talk
throughout history,
creating havoc,
trampling.
ME
This is it:
inspiration, me.
Not for me your inspiration
but my own,
nor for you
but yours.
But where would I find it,
this me?
Not where I am
nor where it is
alone, as I am
at all times in life,
but in everyone except me.
I will return to it,
that is, to myself,
on our deathbeds.
DON’T WAIT
Don’t wait for a change of mind.
Nothing waits for you. Don’t wait
for the right moment,
for good wishes.
Seize it tonight, and pour
each feeling, great or small,
each friendship, barren, spite:
there is no sin but silence.
Lose nothing of your mind,
let it nestle with you
in words, however fine or wretched,
name all that has ever passed
through your eyes, ears, tonight,
through your mind;
if confused, unutterable, so be it.
But knot that errant thread.
LIMBO LINES
(Versions of ‘Línte Liombó
from the Irish of Seán Ó Ríordáin)
LIMBO LINES
BROWN EYES
LOCAL MUSIC
THE COMPANY OF FOOLS
IN THE CHAPEL
UNDERWATER STONES
A PERSON HAS GONE OUT OF LIFE
THIN WOMAN
CHANGE
WILL
HAVING LEFT HIM IN THE POUND
FORM
MOONLIT
LIGHT
LIFE IN DEATH
TOIL
HOWEVER HIGH THE MOON
TO MY FRIENDS
ME
DON’T WAIT
LIMBO LINES
Dear to me, the lines
I had to put aside
when they jumped to the fore
to be part of a poem.
Others are now shaped
at a desk, officiously,
and no place for the discards
in any collection.
How do I know they weren’t the ones
that would best plead the cause,
that would best put me into
what was to be said?
But I launched other envoys
to argue their own case
as if the original
were lacking proper merit.
If I’d kept faith with those
I’d had to refuse,
is it I or my other
I’d see in the mirror?
BROWN EYES
Her brown eyes, these in her son’s shell.
A touch of loveliness, her eyes descending on you,
a privileged contact with her body and mind.
Brief a thousand years caught in her gaze.
Strange to see him occupy those eyes,
embarrassing to face her since she became a man.
How could I know, when they were hers, those woman’s
eyes would one day be mannish, deep,
where find a greater cause of confusion,
how must I change my speech to match them now?
She wasn’t the first to look with them,
nor will he be, I think, the last.
Is this a taste of our eternity,
that our portion wends
from mother to son to mother,
each opposite engendered?
LOCAL MUSIC
He heard the music in the talk of Dún Chaoin,
not the words but the music that travels
through the speech and taste of Munster,
the music a stranger hears;
local music the speakers don’t hear,
music I never heard
because of its closeness to me,
and I haltered by its vigour.
Music heard yet in Munster, even
in places where the dialect is abandoned.
THE COMPANY OF FOOLS
It’s hard to be alone on your own,
a calling too high, too narrow,
a beckoning to madness.
Easier to be alone in a crowd;
wherever you are, you’re alone,
gravely escorting yourself,
what matter any company
but your pitiless own: a crushing
falsehood any other
on your drumming road of truth.
IN THE CHAPEL
Hear my entreaty and take back
the thought I lost on my way in,
there was a priceless mystery there
and if I don’t reclaim it, it will be lost.
Its music ever since in my heart.
It didn’t grow overnight, though it came promptly,
but knowledge which was sifted from all my life;
if I had it again, I would get a rope
to bind it tight, or I’d be of little worth.
The speed of its music in my heart.
It would beckon words with the proper gesture,
only the strong would respond,
it would sense its image precisely
and be ransomed by words into flesh.
Its dew fell into my heart.
Lord, I entreat you, let it return,
the thought I lost on my way in.
Its music a sorrow in my heart.
UNDERWATER STONES
A golden autumn afternoon,
bare limbs on the beach,
bellies and limbs sprouting
from spotted swimsuits
revealing the human shape
unhidden but the core –
their skins pale confessions:
all but one black toddler, skin sparkling
like stones in shallow water,
brighter than what there was of white,
that golden autumn afternoon.
A PERSON HAS GONE OUT OF LIFE
A person has gone out of life.
She went this morning after five;
the colour straightway left her cheek
and her features started marbling;
as if on orders from her Maker,
they stood to attention publicly,
a rigid soldier made of each,
beauty among them spreading thin.
The last collection of this woman’s
features published on a board,
her skeleton bound in a habit,
the business editorially cold.
I see her making for heaven as if astray,
blinded by the light, this life still in her eyes,
tangled in words which are now receding,
eternity in her grasp, she slow to grasp it.
THIN WOMAN
I passed one evening a thin
woman sitting on a ditch.
I greeted her, she me,
between us mere inches
But near as she was, no further
was bald Conan Mac Morna
and all that unfamiliar crew
evicted from their storied home.
She couldn’t be reached to speak to,
hidden in frozen words;
if she ever felt her mind
in bloom, you’d never know it.
I yielded to her, and answered
in her native foreignness,
acknowledging the gap between us
no wider than competing species.
CHANGE
Change her cat-shape
in your mind to a woman
and you’ll see
that she’d be a fine woman
and you a tomcat.
WILL
It had to happen. It couldn’t be avoided.
No blame on me because of it.
Since Adam in the Old Law laid eyes on Eve
the end forever of my avoiding it.
Since that mistake in the garden of Paradise
the stain travelled until my thought happened.
I would have preferred – though I was unheeded –
to remain in a void than turn into a person.
Who could listen or consent to my wish
and I only a thing that was never a thing?
But they’re not the same, a never-born nothing
and the nothing to be born after a nothing-term.
Was I thought of in my forebears’ conception?
Was I a thing before lodged in the womb?
I was willed by the Will that wills all,
who has willed all wills and all to come.
Without consent of my will. I couldn’t refuse:
refusal of will is a will in itself.
If I say something and it’s not I who says it,
I can’t listen, not having the voice of the Will.
When it chooses to speak, this voice of the Will
travels throughout and through the world.
Each thought through me, that thought is the Will’s,
my task to carry it whole to birth.
I am only a cell of the body of my forebears
and the body must live when the cell is exhausted;
I am only a deed willed by the Old Law
which will deed on when I have been shrouded.
It can’t be remedied. The harm is done.
I must live with my kind in the midst of others.
HAVING LEFT HIM
IN THE POUND
Greyhound, don’t grieve tonight.
You always welcomed life, your bark
the most generous welcome I had
though I was the one put an end to it.
Greyhound, you’re alone now
if beast you are and not a shade;
waiting the final wound
among unfeeling foes.
Your hound-heart big, incapable
of anything but love
for those who’d let you down –
only a vagrant hound.
But you wore a house-dog’s habit,
wildness in decline; tonight
nothing of your love of running
but my heart in racing anguish.
FORM
Everything that comes
goes away and comes back
and our first glory returns;
and a ripe man does
as he did as an infant:
in store, a renewal of youth.
When a child is born
there is no going back;
everything to be is born.
And if at times we go
from ourselves, wishing
an other in our shape,
we return empty
from every journey,
ever sealed with our first form.
MOONLIT
However cloudy the sky tonight,
a full moon, an eye of light
is washing: its place
in the sky is at war –
declared by light on darkness –
and as far as is in its power
this destruction of light widens, darkens.
In this twilit place are wide mountains
and tracts of ocean
and distant sunsets
eaten by light from darkness.
The lusts of tragedy are in
the unbearable beauty of these lit places.
We’d rather it be hidden,
this sudden beauty;
there is no roadway to its breast,
no shape or power in it;
it’s swallowed by a cloud
as I am by the house.
LIGHT
Night fell bit by bit
until everything was gone,
bright and black equally black,
chairs lost their shape,
the room concealed,
blackness swallowed every shape.
In the womb of darkness is a world,
I cannot touch it with my hand,
all’s left is memory in a mind
too slothful to re-create.
I lit, and with a start the room
was reborn in my eyes,
chairs jumped out of the black,
sun rose behind my fingers,
light made a world.
I switched it off, and all died,
my two hands and all
the eyes made live before.
When my light is fully gone
a world will be left whole, intact,
but wholly gone.
LIFE IN DEATH
She died last year,
her features legible;
she no longer woman nor man
but a cold thing she surrendered,
she now where she was laid,
a living grave.
TOIL
Without the cruel prop of toil,
how can the fallen stand
bone-naked in the middle
of his terrifying mind?
HOWEVER HIGH THE MOON
There is no fly, no moth, no bee
God-made; no woman, man
whose fate doesn’t concern us.
No passing interest is allowed,
no excuse of nerves;
no person in the valley of the mad
by whose side we shouldn’t sit,
alongside whom we shouldn’t walk
as they carry our ills in the mind.
There is no place, hedge, bush,
however remote; no stone
be in north, south, east, west,
whose situation doesn’t call
on our concern and sympathy;
however far South Africa,
however high the moon,
they are a proper part of us:
no place on the face of the globe
in which we were not born.
TO MY FRIENDS
You make me sick, and no wonder;
your self-conceited talk,
your authoritative opinions,
your support for all things petty,
stand for the unjust hold
the strong have on the weak
today and for thousands of years;
the shadow of falsehoods
you still promulgate; your faith
in the name of the Christ you’ve ruined.
I will fight you to the death
even though you are my friends
because I hear the high echo of your talk
throughout history,
creating havoc,
trampling.
ME
This is it:
inspiration, me.
Not for me your inspiration
but my own,
nor for you
but yours.
But where would I find it,
this me?
Not where I am
nor where it is
alone, as I am
at all times in life,
but in everyone except me.
I will return to it,
that is, to myself,
on our deathbeds.
DON’T WAIT
Don’t wait for a change of mind.
Nothing waits for you. Don’t wait
for the right moment,
for good wishes.
Seize it tonight, and pour
each feeling, great or small,
each friendship, barren, spite:
there is no sin but silence.
Lose nothing of your mind,
let it nestle with you
in words, however fine or wretched,
name all that has ever passed
through your eyes, ears, tonight,
through your mind;
if confused, unutterable, so be it.
But knot that errant thread.