the west coast of irish light
is inside everything and through everything
like the washing on the line, the pegs
the sky, the wind, this window, and your hands, your eyes
the yolk of daisies and the white
stone walls of cottages with slate roofs
clipped with strips of tin, and rooks and crows
gulls and blackbirds, sheep and cows all caught in the same spell
from before morning until after night
for eighteen hours a day the photons
scooped off the atlantic and smashed into peat bogs, earth, fence-wire, rust, paint
bushes, mountains, cars and roads and poems
to borrow a licence from wright
build for their own resurrection day
in a one-way experiment with wild geese, swans, the coil of air, and cold
and rain five minutes ago, and in five minutes’ time, rain
compacted with second sight
hedges and ditches, smoke, thought, clouds and mist compressed, compelled
annealed and overlaid, and overloaded with clarity, clamped down
into landscape already magnified with force, worn inward and set, against the horizon
steeped in a paradox of height
confined to mid-range, revealed at human scale, condensed, but unabridged, unabbreviated
the quality of illumination is absolute, intensified, unshielded, unchallenged, understated
quiet, like the moon lit from within, rock, bone, a candle, a teardrop, enamelled and sprung, sheer
and supersaturated deep bright

 

 

CONTENTS: MAY 2011