Eamon Grennan

What over the gable-end and high up under tangled cloud that raven might be saying to its tumble-soaring mate or what the blackbird might intend when chattering among scattered breadcrumbs or what the bellowing of one cow then another in the near field might mean remains beyond my ken—being all noise for which no words will manage though all is language settling and unsettling the world beyond me . . . and yet there’s the dunnock in all its dun colours at work among the small stones and patchy grass of the driveway and here’s the robin’s aggressive tilt at breadcrumbs and there goes the sudden shriek of the blackbird . . . all alive inside the inhuman breath-pattern of the wind trawling every last leaf and blade of grass and flinging rain like velvet pebbles onto the skylight: nothing but parables in every bristling inch of the out-of-sight unspoken never-to-be-known pure sense-startling untranslatable there of the world as we find it.

There's a word you've met but once and now forgotten for the spoon-shaped concave under your Adam's apple: a small pouch that must be kissed and kissed again by lovers learning the ins and outs of one another and where last night in the sleeping dark a lone mosquito inserted itself and drew fresh blood and left venom and a couple of love-bites then left without waking you although this morning you'll blaze with the minute but unassuageable pain of them—which only that word that's vanished into the mud of memory might be the right cooling balm for.

Yes, the heart aches, but you know or think you know it could be indigestion after all, the stomach uttering its after-lunch cantata for clarinet and strings, while blank panic can be just a two-o'clock shot of the fantods, before the afternoon comes on in toe-shoes and black leotard, her back a pale gleaming board-game where all is not lost though the hour is late and you've got light pockets. There is a port-hole of light at the end of the hemlock tunnel: birds cross it, flashing their voices at you, and you feel— from the way they tilt their heads and their throats swell— the beat of their brief song, another sign the world is what it is: a shade-tree heavy with households, its fruit for meat, its leaf for medicine. But that business of the first kiss is hard to fathom: knees quaking, white water over broken rock, and the coracle you trusted your life to in a bit of a spin, head swimming with the smell of flesh so close you feel it breathing, spilling secrets— its inmost name, for one, and what the near future feels like, time wobbling to a tribal thing without tenses, and that tenacious "I" a thing of the past, only a particle of the action now, nothing separate, a luminous tumult, an affair of air and palate, air and larynx, tongue, throat, teeth, whatever brings the words out in their summer dresses—and you can hear the crow's black scavenger guffawing, egg- and offal-scoffer, comedian of windspin, so all of a sudden you rush your kingdom-come, the two of you, insects shedding your dry, chitinous skins. And although what's left is raw for a while, the slightest breath burns it, in time it comes to become you, you can live into it, intoning the Sebastian koan— whose who in pain, who's who?— and know, or close-to-know, the here it is: two clean rooms in the next parish to wholeness.

It’s the way they cannot understand the window they buzz and buzz against, the bees that take a wrong turn at my door and end up thus in a drift at first of almost idle curiosity, cruising the room until they find themselves smack up against it and they cannot fathom how the air has hardened and the world they know with their eyes keeps out of reach as, stuck there with all they want just in front of them, they must fling their bodies against the one unalterable law of things—this fact of glass—and can only go on making the sound that tethers their electric fury to what’s impossible, feeling the sting in it.

All Souls’ over, the roast seeds eaten, I set on a backporch post our sculpted pumpkin under the weather, warm still for November. Night and day it gapes in at us through the kitchen window, going soft in the head. Sleepwalker-slow, a black rash of ants harrows this hollow globe, munching the pale peach flesh, sucking its seasoned last juices dry. In a week, when the ants and humming flies are done, only a hard remorseless light drills and tenants it through and through. Within, it turns mould-black in patches, stays days like this while the weather takes it in its shifty arms: wide eye-spaces shine, the disapproving mouth holds firm. Another week, a sad leap forward: sunk to one side so an eye-socket’s almost blocked, it becomes a monster of its former self. Human, it would have rotted beyond unhappiness and horror to some unspeakable subject state—its nose no more than a vertical hole, the thin bridge of amber between nose and mouth in ruins. The other socket opens wider than ever: disbelief. It’s all downhill from here: knuckles of sun, peremptory steady fingers of frost, strain all day and night— cracking the rind, kneading the knotted fibres free. The crown, with its top-knot mockery of stalk, caves in; the skull buckles; the whole sad head drips tallowy tears: the end is in sight. In a day or two it topples on itself like ruined thatch, pus-white drool spidering from the corner of the mouth, worming its way down the body-post. All dignity to the winds, it bows its bogeyman face of dread to the inevitable. And now, November almost out, it is in the bright unseasonable sunshine a simmer of pulp, a slow bake, amber shell speckled chalk-grey with lichen. Light strikes and strikes its burst surfaces: it sags, stays at the end of its brief tether—a helmet of dark circles, death caul. Here is the last umbilical gasp, everybody’s nightmare parent, the pitiless system rubbing our noses in it. But pity poor lantern-head with his lights out, glob by greasy glob going back where he came from: as each seed-shaped drop falls free, it catches and clutches for one split second the light. When the pumpkin lapses to our common ground at last—where a swaddle of snow will fold it in no time from sight—I try to take in the empty space it’s left on top of the wooden post: it is that empty space.

A spear of zinc light wounds stone and water, stripping the scarlet fuchsia bells and yellow buttercups of any discretion, so they confess their end in this luminous declaration that they are no more than shortlived absolutes in living colour, bright eyes open against the dark. A light in which everything is exact-edged, flat, no bulk or heft to it, yet decisively itself in outline: islands, the matte grey sea, and miles away the fine glowing line of the horizon that like desire will be the last to go. The mountain's immense green and brown triangle reflects on itself in lakewater, doubling its shape and colour there, its stillness something drastic, an aspect of dread—as if a lover tried to remember that loved other body by looking in the mirror. Almost at random, shadows fall across the small roads—which can never follow their own bent, but always take the grain of the hill, turning to its every tilt and inclination—and evening starts to seep into hedges and hung washing: it is the brown colour of a bat's wing, and silent as a bat is. Even your own family now would have to be streaked with it, their faces by degrees bleeding away in the gather-dark, whole patches of them blackening like zones of a map thrown on smouldering embers.

Acorn-brown, the girl's new nipples draw the young men's rooster eyes where a woman is fitting a man to her mouth, breathing fire, holding for dear life. Green almonds in their shells: she knifes them open one at a time and hands him a slick teardrop, cool white tasting cool white. Nothing compares with such austerities, although the skull's honeycomb of bone will break their hearts, who need hearts like a bird's wishbone, to bend, unbend at every feathery beat—wishbone hearts, or something fleet and light as an ostrich's leg-bone, bearing him to where, panicked with grief, he can bury his head in sand. Papyrus light: a scarf with black parrots on it lifts in the breeze, and a real rare bird is about to fly—his head in the clouds, his life shrouded in daylight he keeps breaking.

Your jewel box of white balsa strips and bleached green Czechoslovakian rushes stands open where you keep it shelved in the bathroom. Morning and evening I see you comb its seawrack tangle of shell, stone, wood, glass, metal, bone, seed for the bracelet, earring, necklace, brooch or ring you need. Here's brass from Nepal, a bangle of African ivory and chased silver for your wrist, a twist of polished sandalwood seeds, deep scarlet, gleaming like the fossil tears of some long-gone exotic bird with ruby crest, sapphire claws. Adriatic blue, this lapis lazuli disc will brighten the pale of your throat, and on this small alabaster seal-ring the phantom of light inscribes a woman tilting an amphora, clear as day, almost as old as Alexander. To the ebony velvet brim of your hat you'll pin a perfect oval of abalone, a dark-whorled underwater sheen to lead us to work this foggy February morning. We'll leave your nest of brightness in the bathroom between the mirror and the laundry-basket where my dirty shirts sprawl like drunks amongst your skirts and blouses. Lace- work frills and rainbow silk pastels, your panties foam over the plastic brim, and on the shower-rail your beige and talc-white bras dangle by one strap like the skinned Wicklow rabbits I remember hanging from hooks outside the victuallers' big windows. We've been domesticated strangely, love, according to our lights: when you walk by me now, naked and not quite dry from the shower, I flatten my two hands on your wet flank, and wonder at the tall column of flesh you are, catching the faint morning light that polishes you pale as alabaster. You're warm, and stay a moment still like that, as though we were two planets pausing in their separate orbits, pendant, on the point of crossing. For one pulse-stroke they take stock of their bodies before returning to the journey. Dressed, you select a string of chipped amber to hang round your neck, a pair of star-shaped earrings, a simple ring of jet-black lustrous onyx. Going down the stairs and out to the fogbound street, you light my way.

for Louis Asekoff Mid-October, Massachusetts. We drive through the livid innards of a beast—dragon or salamander—whose home is fire. The hills a witch’s quilt of goldrust, flushed cinnamon, wine fever, hectic lemon. After dark, while water ruffles, salted, in a big pot, we four gather towards the woodfire, exchanging lazy sentences, waiting dinner. Sunk in the supermarket cardboard box, the four lobsters tip and coolly stroke each other with rockblue baton legs and tentative antennae, their breath a wet clicking, the undulant slow shift of their plated bodies like the doped drift of patients in the padded ward. Eyes like squished berries out on stalks. It’s the end of the line for them, yet faintly in that close-companioned air they smell the sea, a shadow-haunted hole to hide in till all this blows over. When it’s time, we turn the music up to nerve us to it, then take them one by one and drop in the salty roil and scald, then clamp the big lid back. Grasping the shapely fantail, I plunge mine in headfirst and feel before I can detach myself the flat slap of a jackknifed back, glimpse for an instant before I put the lid on it the rigid backward bow-bend of the whole body as the brain explodes and lidless eyes sear white. We two are bound in silence till the pot-lid planks back and music floods again, like a tide. Minutes later, the four of us bend to brittle pink intricate shells, drawing white sweet flesh with our fingers, sewing our shroud-talk tight about us. Later, near moonless midnight, when I scrape the leafbright broken remains into the garbage can outside, that last knowing spasm eels up my arm again and off, like a flash, across the rueful stars.

Out the living-room window I see the two older children burning household trash under the ash tree in wind and rain. They move in slow motion about the flames, heads bowed in concentration as they feed each fresh piece in, hair blown wild across their faces, the fire wavering in tongues before them so they seem creatures half flame, half flesh, wholly separate from me. All of a sudden the baby breaks slowly down through the flexed branches of the ash in a blaze of blood and green leaves, an amniotic drench, a gleaming liver-purple slop of ripe placenta, head first and wailing to be amongst us. Boy and girl look up in silence and hold gravely out flamefeathered arms to catch her, who lands on her back in their linked and ashen hands. Later, when I take her in my arms for a walk to that turn on the high road where the sea always startles, I can see how at intervals she's thunderstruck by a scalloped green leaf, a shivering jig of grassheads, or that speckled bee that pushes itself among the purple and scarlet parts of a fuchsia bell. And her eyes are on fire.