Fahy Armada

[Blissweaver]

Ox-bow lake, calf bestraddled,
evidencing juncus, nardus, festuca,
red and turgid rivulets.

Bogflood.

You were the fort of pine for the Burkes
in Grace's castle, embayed,
when La Rata Encoronada ran aground,
that September.

Wahlenbergia hederacea,
Salix atrocinerea,
these exotic strands bent to river oblivion
are de Leiva's men,
camped in the Doona wood
awaiting the Santa Ana
and passage to an Antrim drowning
Away from Lucan's cull.

The woods are down, the plains are flooded,
La Rata is seen at low tide
In shifting sand
Two hundred yards out now
and the blackred ditches here
bleed young men hacked before shipsail
by Bingham's sword

(ambitious courtly steel
For Faery Queene Cynthia,
Custodian of souls).

Bogflood, tideblood.
All about Jack Daly's grazing lands.
And the waters past Blackrock
swirl, deadglutted to the North.

Fahy. It means "a playing field."

___

 

[Blissweaver]

The Turfcutter

I trudge through deep bog:
peatwater ditchsplash boots stomp
through floodblack turfspoil.

Dropsheet deathchill winds
roar through halfempty plastic
turfbag famine mouths.

Bent in my oilskins,
Seasalt lashing my red face,
I work through the storm.

There will be enough.
I will fill my barn with turf.
Let rains do their worst.

 

[Blissweaver]

You will run the wet fields barefooted in the raining dawn. You will dally, lovedally down, skipping in windblown patterned skirts along the rustling dewstarred boglands by the mouth of Doona shore, the black ford, under a sky awhirl with raven stars. You will ramble down to the sandybank well, your waterpails keenclanking, keen clanking. Pails to be filled, to be brimmed, to be oceansteeped and weighted; a heart to be filled in an ocean dawn of rain. You will cross the green bound rushwet stones,dewshingle mistmorning sandybank mantled, your bare feet imprinted with insignias of grass and toes twined with skirts of bog pink posie petals. You will pass Corrigan's field in the September rain with Achill winds blowing your goldenhair, ablaze in sunny longshadow rain like the mane of Grainuaile on the prow of her proud ship, aflame and aglow in sunrise breezeraying seaspraying oceanrain. You will feel the wordless waterwhisperings of women whose mountain heartsongs rained throughout centuries of love like dew that fed deep veinous roots in the cuddled earth beneath your naked feet. You will skip the path to Corrigan's well, your broad deepthroated pails catching rainbow glimmers from the cleft of Saddle Head. And you will lean to the well's brick white grounddeeping wall, feeling it under your palmtouch to be, to be, not solid but a mass of fizzing, whizzing shimmerings of electric pulses, conversations within withinness, while your woman's breath diffuses with the deep, clear filmless water within, a water of a face, your face, bright, timeless, fluid, jewelbesparkled; a face liplapkissing as water, as dreaming, as diving,as fishpassing under the surfroaring surface of the sea in the shimmer shallows and deepest blueing gulfs of stream, of bending spectral light, of aqua sound. You will feed the deepest veins of roots of new wild western ocean blazing flowers; you will wave deep flower tangles in underwater sun, you will grace wild twines of rush underfoot; you will wear gold suntangling hair of a seaborne pirate queen; and you shall shimmer as the deepest seamade veins of the true heart's core.

________

This is a great board, you know.

 

[Blissweaver]

As The Clocks Strike Thirteen

He bought a pack of shaving razors, now
he's at the bathroom mirror, shaving. Up
he pokes his chin. He drags the blades with slow
steady downward care, and pulls a group
of bristles from their roots. Now he moves
the razor to his face; through soap the steel
slides; skin shine appears in soft pink grooves
while curls of foamblue beard unfurl like peel
and fall down in the white sink water. "Am
I lucky! Yes! Some lands won't let you shave
Your face!" Meanwhile the covert minicam
between the twin blades films him. "Yes, we have
true freedoms here!" He draws the razor close.
Surveillance gets a view right up his nose.