All night it is day. Glycerine shadows fuse sea and sky
into something indivisible. Hoar-frost and snow mingle
with hail.
This is the end of the inhabitable world we are so far north.
Snow-clad mountains spit fire, icebergs drift
in a boiling swell piercing the pale sun in its net of frosty air
We have been at sea for days.
Ice-cold, iron-cold, our lungs tense against the razor chill,
it could be the moon we are so distant from ourselves.
Dreaming and loving here are the same hunger
as we wander in watery exile, storm-beaten
by perishing winds. Ahead the glacial hull looms
spectral in the crushing heaves of pack-ice,
trapped like a fisherman’s float
in the mouth of a silver carp. Tattered sails,
fragments of mast, poke from their crystal coffin
like splintered whale-bone trepanning the empty heart of blue.
For thirteen years they have waited, penitent
as glass angels, black lips welded to alabaster tongues,
untold tales frost-bitten in their throats. Alone
at his log the Captain holds patient vigil
awaiting a huff of divine breath.
So far from home we glide directionless
beneath the bald sun
through cerulean ice-fields, past glacial slabs
too cold even for sea birds,
as grievous and exhausted
we give ourselves up to what we’ve become.
Ballinskelligs
They come to me in dreams
Scariff and Deenish, rising like those islands
floating in a veil of mist in Japanese prints,
their peaks in a halo of cloud.
Early morning the sun casts
rings of bright water, stepping stones of light
out to the distant shore. Midnight
and the islands are sleeping, turned in
on their own emptiness as if remembering
those ghostly lives gleaned on the barren cliffs
stinking of sea birds and herring,
the air thick with turf and old rain.
Now they’ve gone they lie empty as picked
crab shells, the battering sea splattering
their glassy rocks with the spittle of lost tongues.
Outside my window the strait is moon-streaked,
silver as a hairline crack across
an old mirror. It’s as if I could simply rise
from this bed and walk to that distant shore.
Yet the night holds its secrets.
To feel this flat blackness, where even
the stars are hidden, is to understand what
we cannot see at the edge of this visible world.
The single blip of the lighthouse appears,
then disappears every fifteen seconds,
its pulsing beam tracing an arc
across the endless sky, a blinking Cyclops
in the inky dark, till suddenly it’s morning
and the sun comes up;
streaks of blood-red leaching into the grey.