Bog Oak & The Pool

Bog Oak

The bole of it hummocked in the turf,
The knuckles of it deep like a tangled hand
Mummified, clasping the quag.
And the burl of it drowned there
Soaked to a fare-thee-well.
Impervious, hard as a cherry stone.
Death’s implacable fixedness
In the cold bog entombed.
Rock root to the world.

The Pool

Even at night,
When I am far away
From the pool in the Nephin Begs,
Even when I am not there stooped,
Peering through sedge at its silken stillness,
Or waiting in a blind of thorns
For some sudden wonder there to appear -
For which my life is the idiot quest -
The water ever sluices in, withal.

The surface shimmers
In the weird watery glow
Of a sickle moon drifting,
A bright star hung on its horn.

Sometimes, then, the water kelpie,
Become again a glimmering girl,
Rolls languidly to the still top
And slippery, shoulders it over Into slow concentric rings
That splinter the moon into wrinkled rippling winks
And rock the grasses browing the banks.

They rock me too while away I nod
Not asleep, nor yet awake,
But floating, cradled,
Above yawning water vaults.
Gently jostled in the soft twilight,
Lullabied by her water song
Whose beauty steals my breath,
Troubled by vague huge visions
Just beyond my sleepy sight.

The floating stars then fall
And with them, I with her,
Like sugar melting in lemon water
Tracing crystal trails weirdly down,
Fractured, prismed, and bending,
Like the paths to fading memories
Darkly to repose at the bottom of the pool,
Where all the secrets in sometimes slumber dwell.

From Achill Sounds, a collection of poems by Thomas J. Phalen, a friend.

the joy of it

"The main thing is to write for the joy of it.

"Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night, dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.

"Take off from here. And don't be so earnest."

 - Seamus Heaney
shhh! no running in the library!  Read more…

undercut banks

“Beside the rivering waters of, hither and thithering waters of, night.” 
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Through the rain drunk meadow
Fat on mountain showers and drowsy
I stitch, in my scissor step, through the long grass
A furrow like a tipsy ploughman
And harvest before my boots
A skittering wake of hoppers blustery
Down to the rocky banks
Under cottonwood shade.

Trout wand in my hand,
A silly baton, slicing the air.
And like a conductor browbeating the woodwinds
I conjure the slipstream.

I come to track this raveling course
And to track the course in me;
To watch the stalking sun crest the canyon wall
And paint the water pewter shimmery.

To wonder too
At the dizzy stones
And mayflies
Clouding the wild roses.

To feel my boy’s old heart thump, still,
When the water piles up
On the sudden shoulders
Of the heavy trout.

To smell the consequence
Of my slippery steps
On the wet and awkward rocks
That bruise the mint and mugwort.

To see silver dimes clinging
To the water-jostled cress -
Glinting coins in the watery sun
That spend well still indeed.

And too there, once,
Gold-spurred columbines
Elegant as shooting stars
On stems impossibly delicate.

To listen to the fluent
Gravel-throated chortling
Of water on rocks
And the dark sluicing soughing
Of wind in the sedge -
Old languages I remember well
Wandering wild within willow banks.

To feel the cold on my wet pilgrim feet,
The chill on my late autumn cheeks
In the weird arctic half-light
As dusk draws down the glen on me
And the stars a sudden swath of sublime.

And to again remember, surely,
That never will I know
The deep watery secrets
In the currents of time
Unplumbed in dark undercut banks.

From Mountain Wizard, by Thomas J. Phalen. 

woodcraft’s Goodly Booke, A Meditation

I. Windfalls

On the happenstance of windfall
Toppled by the hand of a stern weather
That I gathered to the wood pile for the work
The saw imposes a straight-edge discipline.
And I sling the broken limbs in a crook
One by one - and all different -
And cut them there to size:
As it is written in Woodcraft’ s Goodly Booke.
 

II. The Splitting

The axe-head has good weight
The balance deft, the handshake true.
And its fearsome force, a sweet vectored arc,
Pulls on me, holding hard.
The rhythm of the hurtling
And the handle in my clasp, roots me,
Like a ship’s rail does
On the tossed quotidian seas.
And finally down to the truth:
The sudden snapping split
The crack like breaking bones.
 
III. The Smell of It

It is the smell of it, then,
That blossoms pitchy there
Wafting from the sundered halves
Or mauled to shaggy fours or quintered.
Dejectedly Under swift strokes of steel
And the sight of them, their sinews,
Gaping from the cleaves
That never yet before were seen
And never again will be.
 
IV. The Stacking
 
Then to the labor of the loads
All cut and split and measured
And the diffident architecture
That I there build
Stacked wood on angled wood
Which when it stood,
Festooned between trees
My back knew it was good.

V. The Fire
 
The genii of these winter woods
Keep stanched outside my wooden walls
The night’s chill howling goblins
Whose ice-teeth gnash my panes.
Their fire, a galloping dazzle,
Paints ruddy my old cracked hands
Their spirits awhirl up the flue
Their mist, silver, on the crystalled sky.
 
VI. Prometheus
 
I read my Woodcraft Breviary
And dry my socks, mizzle soaked,
While outside I see, eyes up from the text,
The sawn ends staring back blank at me -
Tidy shelves of sightless eyes
Winking out under brows of snow.
And I know that fire grows on trees
And was stolen from the gods
Like the water, from heaven to cistern.
And I blush at once for that silly theology
With which I’ll have no truck.

From Mountain Wizard, by Thomas J. Phalen.

Tinker’s Penny

“Non, je ne regrette rien.” - Edith Piaf

She was a delicate mountain flower
A trifling unremarkable darling
An inconsequential diminutive.
But she made my juices flow
And in them my head swam.

She was the petaled perfume
Of my one time, forever, spring.
And I loved her well -
The best I could -
In my rounder’s heyday.

She was a precious copper
In this wanderer’s pocket, dispossessed,
In my gaudy wagon, spent,
On the back roads’ secret waysides
My hammer on tin.

What was this treasure, once in my hand,
That I tossed unthinking for a pebble
And now is gone,
Lost all ways,
Beneath concentric rings?

From Mountain Wizard by Thomas J. Phalen, an Irish-American poet friend.