Just Suibhne So
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Just Suibhne So* *The medieval Irish work "Buile Suibhne". Translation James G O Keefe Ms Royal Irish Acadamy. 17th Century. * Suibhne Geilt mythical poet-King of Dal Araidhe anonymous 9th century Irish prose poem The Frenzy of Suibhne. |
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1.) i. The Madness of Suibhne. Nothing I can do wins her back again. I flee, she does not follow. I abuse, she is as stone. I threaten, she disdains. I come, she turns away. Yet I know her heart weeps For the love she has broken. I rave before my desolation & she like a nun pays penance to a barren victory for when a woman weeps, she has beauty & power, when a man weeps, it is forlorn. ii.* Suibhne on St. Patricks London 03. How much is gonna blow – Being here, I gotta know Can’t just let it flow Gotta say no Gotta know How much is gonna blow – Life I’m told goes on We’re gonna be reborn After the explosion The moon’s almost full now Tomorrow it will blow How much is gonna blow - O St Patrick are you hearkening? Are you there at the tavern door? Today’s a day for celebration, It’s just around the corner, & we come not to the feast but riding on the beast. *London just before commencement of war in Iraq. iii.* Sunday Afternoon with Suibhne. (i.) He undresses like an ostrich, plume All & pilot brain, As with the genial smile of the flea, Mottled and scrawny of limb, he Leaps into foam. On the ceiling shadow fighters zoom, Before, in blaze of pink fume, A collage of explosions The minarets adorn. The Mughal hordes swoop down, Down from the Ukraine, No room for immigration, On this Sunday afternoon. * London just after commencement of war in Iraq iv. Sunday Afternoon with Suibhne. (ii) Carnal carnivalesque on walls cavort with stone age brain & chimpanzee heart. Water, electricity & sewers, desmene of rats, rabbit cats, ravenous toads with kangaroo leaps, as the elephants come trampling corn & the locusts swarm through thin blue & white walls in Ariel steam, as spiders scurry to their crannies abandoning molten dewy nets with which he robes his naked self in frail fronds, host to a house of ghosts. v. Suibhne in Bed. Suibine in towelled turban & eve scent mutation Contemplates the evanescent Cities of light in bed coombed Head & foot an exodus of wanderings To the bizarre marching of apocrypha The treasure of Jerusalem disappears With emigration - the Mughals in Herat Convert from the Ukraine Granada in India Lawrence in Mesopotamia Confusion to Robespierre & Napoleon Capitals to the Guillotine Chosen religions for chosen people Secular despotism & soldiers of God Riding the beast to the feast. vi. Suibhne Alone Life has been a series Of long term broken relationships But the children’s descendants go on To their royal icons, wrecker Beacons, bonfires of vanities. Suibhine goes on with nosegays,* & a nose as big as Catullus* * Anonymous saying if the night has a thousand eyes it also has five hundred noses vii. Suibhne more than Erect On viagra falls flat on his back She covers him with slow carnal sweat Clouds billow send not know For whom the bell tolls Suibhne doffs his hat Releasing a spray of doves in her hair viii. Suibhne with Binoculars. The world bursts into a bubble of foam, lo, a new world is born, beginning, not knowing what future can happen, what cannot be taken from the beginning. A Blake is born from agricultural to clockwork time to USA, French & industrial revolution, end of the Jacobean claim to throne as a Cardinal in the Vatican. Renaissance through to Reform, a predecessor to the unforeseen Hanoverian Victorian Muse with Her gunboats to rule the seas. Does he follow, aged in his pent mill, romances of the aesthetic Shelly & fierce Byron etching over Milton´s angels, Christian devils, returning them via routes to the firmament: But O Jerusalem, O City of God, you cannot have it all, you cannot win it all, but fall, not even through Suibine´s binoculars focused on his Martian moon brain, even he must be found in a RIP tomb under reference myths anonymous. ix. Suibhne in a Waiting Room. Suspicious of tense he suspends mood in abeyance, his inhuman mirror self alien, & faces the onslaught as he treks the milky way, & then the real thing, the shattered realities still coming & going, a corpse in a waiting room watching its train depart, the others despatching, no longer responding to signals. x. Suibhne Freudian. Suibhne´s face appears in red anemone to gaze upon mist fields Elysian: stands, blinks naked in paradise alone dawn, on that orison, where has Eve gone. xi. Suibhne´s Exile. Suibhne looks through a niche, through a green aluminium grid to a colourless brick wall lined with bottle green plastic pipes & then down to the niche´s shelf again, ash stained & heaped with butts. Suibhne turns, in the corridors, white coats sway to & fro, come & go, who once had their dreams but now carry out the procedure in their human frailty, which their eyes betray, as Suibine softly says, the system breaks down. Suibhne goes out alone, in the rain, to gaze at but not to nod to, the taxis, like him they know, the streets have no home. |
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xii. What it is like Suibhne whatever you are it is whatever the raw day bled & shed what it is like eyes without sight to stare out night in blight yet you rise again to tremble with dawn shock in your brain & remain with no answer given from a silent heaven but only the known you alone all that you are or ever will be you try to free so giddily more than a word more than the world your mind is unfurled a bird on wing to soar a hole in sky yet never to die or fly. xiii. Suibhne & the likeness of you. in less than a flick of eye lash, less than the blink of an eye or speck of morning dew, can be a lifetime, in the likeness of you. all realms, all domains, your apparel, human & inhuman, as i am too, in the likeness of you. stars disappear in old skies, to reappear anew & every flower in every hour blows on the threshold of moonlight tides, where fairie & jinn, & creatures from the deeps keep in spheres, myriad, in the likeness of you. xiv. Suibhne Black. you stand in a room of timber & stone with lantern aglow & stove´s ruddy roar as without the storm tears at the window presses the wall screeches the door & the roof howls & though it trembles it does not fall you are almost alone almost secure within as you turn lantern down & stove burns thin & night comes in through the door through the window out to black sky black space & nothing & you wait for morn for lightning to come with a new morn as your hand writes weaves in the light the poem & moves on concealing in overt the covert pattern, as a bush burns in light & returns to darkness within* having danced with the night. * after Kavanagh Presences xv. Suibhne and the Siren. i. In the forest heartbeats turn to footsteps on the wind, darkness rises from the ground. ii. Vertigo shadows mast, a chill bolting the diaphragm, as animals hide with eyes to see. iii. But they have long forgotten & ground has resigned the quest, leaves lose their spaces. iv. There is nowhere to stay, neither wisdom nor profanity, only the silence & the siren. v. The maniac barbaric, the bestial snarl, the heroic beserk, the frenzy of carnage, the attack of the pack, the hawk of flock. vi. Aviary in Avernus, desolate lake, where ancestors sleep in the lair of the beast. vii. Who has also forgotten in its long song in erosion, its first born freedom. viii. At meer* it darkens more, another turn , her gasp, high sigh, so close, twice, a breath in the ear. ix. He stumbles in the dyke braye, mud clay across water, to the steep horizon on the footsteps of the wind. x. To no way out, exit barred, shackles on the bridge of no return, the song of the ground gone. xi. Only the song of the siren, her laughter and her tears, through the long lonely years. * Meer an early Anglo Saxon word for a brook which determined borders to the Shires. xvi. Suibhne’s Song to the Shadows. We have lived in dreams That could not be broken, But years as time have stolen. & struck by a blow unseen, I see a vision fading. Fading as grail in grain, In the corridors of time, Floored with their pain. The loneliness of the unknown, The song of the swan, A flowing shadow on the plain Following the beckoning horizon. xvii. Suibhne amongst Chimneys. Quarried rock from the hill, mason hewn, smooth, rough, round or hand dyke laid. A town’s tier walls stained in clouds of moss, fungi, lichen, only grime belies their fragrance. Drain pipe in September rain, wild weed corner, dandelion, leaf red bramble in black warts. Rain runs as blood into shadows, its speechless phantoms amazed, after so long, still misunderstood. xviii. Suibhne in Love. Talking with you my dear is like standing on a trap door at the gallows. Perhaps we don’t love each other so much after all & this is the worst moment for the fall, unredeemed failure. xix. Suibhne goes Human .* Come creature & conjoin the human club, Don’t turn your nose up at it with a snub. Become a member of the human race, Where any old mug will fit with a face. Don’t skulk in the shadows an animal beast, Phase out the music, a human at least. And should the whole shamozzle then be lies, It doesn’t matter as everyone dies. Even though we’re neither unique nor great, Join the human club before it’s too late. A place where all have a story to tell, Dearly afterwards a soul to sell. For though it reads as silly and sad, It’s all the elements good, bad and mad. Handed down in righteous privilege, Bred in a sty, in a pidge, in a squidge. Ice cream man on a green hill far away, Last inhabited island after thaw day. |
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2000, first book of (Trilogy) In Memoria. |
