limerick IRELAND M

October 29th 2012

 

Multiple images as words become repeated – the woman at the table writing.

Still, in stillness, breath makes me want to breath

Feeling no breath, not death but none the less dark.

 

What are those little hairs inside the lungs called?

 

Whispers become sighs become exhalations as she moves, 

Ahhhhh that’s their name

 

I sing a hymn on my knees, Guy is singing too arms extended running in the space the throat opens.

As he sings Lin breathes on the window, repeatedly.

 

Lin is stuck on the table, head down, hair tumbling for a long time. 

Now we are both stuck on the breathing table. 

 

Poem about stillness, and Guy, breath insect and the text of the soft feet. He is singing again and Lin joins him.

Disco running becomes a unicorn, starship, echo. A breathing paper.

 

October 30th 2012

 

Sometimes, waiting, something drops.

 

Standing in the vast space of waiting, quivering, as all the noise falls I cling to a smell of music, soft landing onto

moving grass.

 

It takes a long time to find nothing.

Frowning face thunders in circles

Hot burning sensations are left in the throat, then on the wall scratched, scorched

 

Billowing man with his dog simply out walking takes flight and the crows become black and white and hairy air blown.

 

She tosses on the sea floor, tresses, as copper leaves quiver too, ah rustle becomes rust again and again, leaves,

leaving drop, drop, drop it. Right, writing

 

The raft with its snow clean white sheet receives her dropped there dangling.

 

Walt Whitman, the grass is moving, crows fly over a crane digging the ground outside and all the construction workers

have hard hats. 

 

Seamus Heaney’s squat pen and the image of a gun shattering glass becomes the bang bang bang of a nail being hit on

the head as she presses against the window, hair flying.

 

The open door lets in the smell of air. Shadows and memories of shadows play in the light as she writes and the man walks

towards us empty handed. It takes a long time to find nothing.

 

As he walks on through the water, merman, the sea feels full. Under water, expanding, then lightly dashed against the rock,

pebble person drops easily to the sea floor, door and the fire extinguisher.

 

31st October

 

Sounds try to move into words but they are stopped before they find their destination in form and meaning.

 

Fragments of this and that or that or maybe even the other all presenting themselves as equal, damn it. Nothing crying out

for attention until the truck landed as the one. Over time it became remembered as red – just for effect – dramatic red.

 

Guy belly pressed on white sheet pen poised noting the fragments as we gather the bits. Lin checks for effects and affects

and we let them in.

 

Nobody remembers the full William Carlos Williams poem about the red wheelbarrow. I am surprised. I thought – break –

doesn’t matter break, back again to the place before, to the squat pen.

 

Pennies thrown and lines scratched to find meaning. I Ching is in, but no soma ah no matics Noooooooooooooooooooooooo,

they cried out, as they circled

Nooooooooooooo soma……cut.

 

Squat and snug. Lin’s torso is tucked in squat under Mary who becomes snug. Squat pressed in by Snug. Between the torso

and the tigh, a squat pen rests, I wonder what Seamus Heaney might think about that, snug as a gun.

 

Guy, quick draw, drawing lines in the air repeatedly

 

Fragments fall again as part words look to find their form and some meanings become more in the sounds, but less too.

What the hell is happening. And where did the birds and the man on the elephant’s back go?

 

Thursday 1st November.

 

I read a poem The Red Poppy by Louise Gluck. It begins with the following lines –

The great thing,

is not having

a mind. Feelings:

oh I have those: they govern me

 

Lin in the crashing big white waves swept up by the squaking bird’s fury. Crackling arms and….

We talk about Eavan Boland’s  poem, ‘Night Feed’. Later Guy is rocked and cradled, a baby round as a Buddha. Propelled

by the flowing sweep of Evan Boland’s words remembered Mary lifts him into her arms. Soft hair that holds traces of mint and

fennel, smell now gone, leaving a tender trace.

 

Lin reads Brendan Kenelly’s poem the Happy Grass as she traces circles on the white page. I think of dead bodies buried in

black earth being heard by the singing green grass.

 

Pilgrimage over icy mountains leads me to an igloo and shoes made of fish skin measured. 

 

Golden hair plaited with stories of curls and curlers and cows licks that move clockwise in circles.

 

How lovely to hear the whole poem ‘Digging’ by Seamus Heaney read by Lin lying on her back as Guy sits writing at the desk.

The full poem read. Red which reminds me of the wheelbarrow and now the poppy too opening its heart to the sun.

 

Mary Nunan