Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!

The beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses -

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads -

Now the spoiler has come; does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works will dissolve. Meanwhile the image of pristine beauty

Lives at the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. - As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

The Winter Palace

Most people know more as they get older:

I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century

Losing what I had learnt at university

And refusing to take in what had happened since.

Now I know none of the names in the public prints,

And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces

And swearing I've never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage

To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold in to itself, like fields, like snow.

The Diamond Cutter

Not what the light will do but how he shapes it

And what particular colours it will bear.

And something of the climber's concentration

Seeing the white peak, setting the right foot there.

Not how the sun was plausible at morning

Nor how it was distributed at noon,

And not how much the single stone could show

But rather how much brilliance it would shun:

Simply a paring down, a cleaving to

One object, as the star-gazer who sees

One single comet polished by its fall
Rather than countless, untouched galaxies.

The Ideal

This is where I came from.

I passed this way.

This should not be shameful

Or hard to say.

A self is a self.

It is not a screen.

A person should respect

What he has been.

This is my past

Which I shall not discard.

This is the ideal.
This is hard.

From the Irish

According to Dineen, a Gael unsurpassed

in lexicographical enterprise, the Irish

for moon means 'the white circle in a slice

of half-boiled potato or turnip'. A star

is the mark on the forehead of a beast

and the sun is the bottom of a lake, or well.

Well, if I say to you your face

is like a slice of half-boiled turnip,

your hair is the colour of a lake's bottom

and at the centre of each of your eyes

is the mark of the beast, it is because
I want to love you properly, according to Dineen.

Flowers

Some men never think of it.

You did. You'd come along

And say you'd nearly brought me flowers

But something had gone wrong.

The shop was closed. Or you had doubts -

The sort that minds like ours

Dream up incessantly. You thought

I might not want your flowers.

It made me smile and hug you then.

Now I can only smile.

But, look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.

Spellbound

The night is darkening round me,

The wild winds coldly blow;

But a tyrant spell has bound me

And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending

Their bare boughs weighed with snow.

And the storm is fast descending,

And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,

Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing drear can move me;

I will not, cannot go.