Written by
Eamon Grennan |
I am watching Cleo listening, our cat
listening to Mozart's Magic Flute.
What
can she be hearing? What
can the air carry into her ears like that,
her ears swivelling like radio dishes that
are tuned to all the noise of the world, flat
and sharp, high and low, a scramble of this and that
she can decode like nobody's business, acrobat
of random airs as she is? Although of course a bat
is better at it, sifting out of its acoustic habitat
the sound of the very shape of things automat-
ically-- and on the wing, at that.
The Magic Flute! What
a joy it is, I feel, and wonder (to the end this little scat)
doe , or can, the cat.
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Written by
Eamon Grennan |
Looking for distinctive stones, I found the dead otter
rotting by the tideline, and carried all day the scent of this savage
valediction.
That headlong high sound the oystercatcher makes
came echoing through the rocky cove
where a cormorant was feeding and submarining in the bay
and a heron rose off a boulder where he'd been invisible,
drifted a little, stood again -- a hieroglyph
or just longevity reflecting on itself
between the sky clouding over and the lightly ruffled water.
This was the morning after your dream of dying, of being held
and told it didn't matter.
A butterfly went jinking over
the wave-silky stones, and where I turned
to go up the road again, a couple in a blue camper sat
smoking their cigarettes over their breakfast coffee (blue
scent of smoke, the thick dark smell of fresh coffee)
and talking in quiet voices, first one then the other answering,
their radio telling the daily news behind them.
It was warm.
All seemed at peace.
I could feel the sun coming off the water.
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Written by
Eamon Grennan |
At her Junior High School graduation,
she sings alone
in front of the lot of us--
her voice soprano, surprising,
almost a woman's.
It is
the Our Father in French,
the new language
making her strange, out there,
fully fledged and
ready for anything.
Sitting
together -- her separated
mother and father -- we can
hear the racket of traffic
shaking the main streets
of Jersey City as she sings
Deliver us from evil,
and I wonder can she see me
in the dark here, years
from belief, on the edge
of tears.
It doesn't matter.
She
doesn't miss a beat, keeps
in time, in tune, while into
our common silence I whisper,
Sing, love, sing your heart out!
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Written by
Eamon Grennan |
Through an accidental crack in the curtain
I can see the eight o'clock light change from
charcoal to a faint gassy blue, inventing things
in the morning that has a thick skin of ice on it
as the water tank has, so nothing flows, all is bone,
telling its tale of how hard the night had to be
for any heart caught out in it, just flesh and blood
no match for the mindless chill that's settled in,
a great stone bird, its wings stretched stiff
from the tip of Letter Hill to the cobbled bay, its gaze
glacial, its hook-and-scrabble claws fast clamped
on every window, its petrifying breath a cage
in which all the warmth we were is shivering.
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Written by
Eamon Grennan |
She's stopped in her southern tracks
Brought haply to this hard knock
When she shoots from the tall spruce
And snaps her neck on the glass.
From the fall grass I gather her
And give her to my silent children
Who give her a decent burial
Under the dogwood in the garden.
They lay their gifs in the grave:
Matches, a clothes-peg, a coin;
Fire paper for her, sprinkle her
With water, fold earth over her.
She is out of her element forever
Who was air's high-spirited daughter;
What guardian wings can I conjure
Over my own young, their migrations?
The children retreat indoors.
Shadows flicker in the tall spruce.
Small birds flicker like shadows--
Ghosts come nest in my branches.
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