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Still Life with Butterflies, Breakers, Atlantic City Noon monarchs. Their crooked descents and ascensions as the light wind lives or dies along nodding fuzz-heads of goldenrod that brighten the ups and downs of dunes: erratic shadows crossing the shadow of your hand as they take the sail-way towards Mexico from this haven of sun and sand, of dreamy mid-day nectars, the voyage stretching its chance and accident ahead of them until millions (even this one brushing your shoulder, riding the rainbow that ghosts a toss-burst of surf for a spectral second or two) make it to a tree in the tropics and start the next cycle. Now sanderlings probe with bills of polished onyx the sand for hapless morsels, while your eyes find over miles of ocean the towers of Atlantic City shining in sea mist, and you see how surf kneeling at your feet is haloed by a disarray of radiances melting into the matter of waves lathering sand and letting you know-as you listen to this unhallowed music of the world making itself heard one big beat at a time-that light itself is no mystery now, walking on water. Makesense Vermont, he says, seen from an eminence, throws itself together. But airwaves clog with a dust storm of bodies under the sun of Africa: boys with guns ripping the red heart out of villages, children hidden for only a minute under robes of saffron, raspberry, sky-blue and then not, the kitchen floor awash in blood. Elsewhere, one oil-slicked cormorant trying to draw asthmatic breath. And still these peregrine eyes set off among the hundred nameless colours of this October morning (amberyellow, I try, rufusginger, winecitron, fox, fawn, bear, mellow flesh of mango), seeking any sort of pattern. What Poussin found, for instance, in that vibrant light and shade in which the man sprawls with the snake that killed him; in which the figure fishing casts a placid line into still water where an arch of branches bows under the shady green weight of summer, while on the far bank in full sunshine a herd of oxen has stopped to drink and be mirrored in all their leather, jet, ivory by the sheer gleam they lean to . . . the whole prodigious scene so disposed it brings mystery and matter into a single unsayable configuration-as if seen from a great height, yet hidden and intimate as your blood is: pulse-parsing in its own innocence, in its immaculate indifference, every passing present moment. Another Dead Moth On the kitchen tiles another dead moth. Tiny design of black and brown triangles, the wings dwarfing the soft tube of the body where nerves stuttered, stopped, light still blazing in fixed pin-eyes brimming with one insatiable desire then nothing. Under the rubble, in the hearts of houses, in the holy places where heads are bowed, hands raised to heaven, ploughshares are beaten into rockets, rose-tips of grey steel scribbled with girlish messages or steeped in the sweat of boys in green tee-shirts, their red headbands fetching light. Believers in what they do, they race, weighted as they are, to embrace the last moment, moth-mouths biting at that impossible light, till all's a flame mid-air, then the grand entranced array of holiday gear flapping across a wide-open sky, a world giving up its gaudiest ghosts, the day one running wound of smoke, a wail of sirens. Reading Beckett in October Great blaze the trees put on: maple, dogwood, birch, oak, beech, tamarack, honey locust, as well as the white pines that change their needles, letting go of gold and being again-as if no end to it, ever-green. Surely the melodic simmer of air, bees among the white impatiens, cedar waxwings sweet-prattling between high branches or embeaking berries sapphire and scarlet; surely the High Road flush with its ebony-sheen gleam-harvest of blackberries; surely this raving, ravenous rush into the blood-letting to come, the trees seeming to cry out, stretch arms and shout Look at us! At what we've become, what's become of us, before all is bare!-in all of it surely we get a glimmer of the whole story, no matter how the head-words stagger to say all is over. Surely, that is, these mortal hues let us for an instant of astonishing light off the hook-the way his blessed, bittersweet wordplay (Gammer Ghost riffing with clown-in-chief, Gaffer Flatpants) again lets us, laughing over the howly void, off. |
| © Copyright Eamon Grennan |
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