A Deserted House

What but design of darkness to appall?

It was the noise in the chimney that reminded me of it, less a buzzing than that deep boom the sea makes in a cavern, the noise of an underground process, a concussion.

I thought of the bee colonies in the mansion house chimney. In the absence of fires set by roughened hands, in that sulphurous and cobwebby shaft, pierced by a rod of light each noon, the waxen cells are painstakingly constructed.

It is the tiredest of metaphors, this six-sided suburb, but what perturbs us now is the logic of its order, like something our production-line minds might concoct, one grub to each cell invariably, incarcerated hatchlings.

Day on day the noise of industry grows in the chimney, afflicting the whole house with tinnitus.

Still the dust motes drift through the curtained rooms, Cupid on his pedestal smiles slyly through his scarf of transparent marble, and as usual no wicks are lit in the Fascinating Lamp Room.

There is just a noise like the sea gnawing at the distant edge of England, gaining a yard or so each year. What made him go, the Seigneur of Holderness, who was steadfast through religious trouble, who understood the meaning of wars?

He vanished, leaving his vintage cellar and ouija board, his riding crop on the hall table. He vanished, and the skeletal whale outside the ha-ha fell to pieces, jangling its mammoth bones.

In the chimney of his house the noise grows. The bees will continue to build, varnishing their hexagons with propolis for the city’s defence. Who now, on hearing that rumour, would infer: less a haunted house than a population in the chimney piece?

– Caitríona O’Reilly

Speak, you also

Speak, you also,
speak as the last,
have your say.

Speak –
But keep yes and no unsplit.
And give your say this meaning:
give it the shade.

Give it shade enough,
give it as much
as you know has been dealt out between
midnight and midday and midnight.

Look around:
look how it all leaps alive -
where death is! Alive!
He speaks truly who speaks the shade.

But now shrinks the place where you stand:
Where now, stripped by shade, will you go?
Upward. Grope your way up.
Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer.
Finer: a thread by which
it wants to be lowered, the star:
to float farther down, down below
where it sees itself gleam: in the swell
of wandering words.

– Paul Celan

Nothing but memories

Broken Dreams

There is grey in your hair,
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing;
But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing
Because it was your prayer
Recovered him upon the bed of death.
For your sole sake–that all heart’s ache have known,
And given to others all heart’s ache,
From meager girlhood’s putting on
Burdensome beauty–for your sole sake
Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,
So great her portion in that peace you make
By merely walking in a room.

Your beauty can but leave among us
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
A young man when the old men are done talking
Will say to an old man, ‘Tell me of that lady
The poet stubborn with his passion sang us
When age might well have chilled his blood.’

Vague memories, nothing but memories,
But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed.
The certainty that I shall see that lady
Leaning or standing or walking
In the first loveliness of womanhood,
And with the fervour of my youthful eyes,
Has set me muttering like a fool.

You are more beautiful than any one,
And yet your body had a flaw:
Your small hands were not beautiful,
And I am afraid that you will run
And paddle to the wrist
In that mysterious, always brimming lake
Where those that have obeyed the holy law
Paddle and are perfect. Leave unchanged
The hands that I have kissed,
For old sake’s sake.

The last stroke of midnight dies.
All day in the one chair
From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged
In rambling talk with an image of air:
Vague memories, nothing but memories.

– William Butler Yeats

Heliotrope

Past beautiful,
stuck in the dust

of a road, her thin
branched head

with its baby hair
and dozen white eyes

so anthropomorphized
and mute—her lover

going down the sky
daily in his flaming steps

and she with her
padlocked gaze—

eternal follower!
Yet the circle’s story

fixes her
at its centre—

her greenish rooted
limbs keep company

with all the buried
girls and boys

whose lost testes
and ovules stir to life

again this month—
under the soft rain

of a god’s grief
the hyacinth and lotus

come, with narcissus
on his sex-struck stem.

– Caitríona O’Reilly

Imagined

“The nation is an imagined political community… It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people … willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

— Benedict Anderson

Homo Sacer

“The world of the happy and that of the unhappy, the world of the good and that of the evil contain the same states of things; with respect to their being-thus they are perfectly identical. The just person does not reside in another world. The one who is saved and the one who is lost have the same arms and legs. The glorious body cannot but be, the mortal body itself. What changes are not the things but their limits. It
is as if there hovered over them something like a halo, a glory.”

- Giorgio Agamben

Fragments of WB

“Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet… This storm is what we call progress.”

- Walter Benjamin

Mary Swanzy, HRHA

Reality Bursting In

“You see Karin, one draws a magic circle around oneself, to keep everything out that doesn’t fit one’s secret games. Each time life breaks through the circle, the games become puny and ridiculous. So one draws a new circle and builds new defences.”

– From Ingmar Bergman, ‘Through a Glass Darkly’

Signs

Everything makes love with silence.

They promised me a silence
like fire, a house of silence.

Suddenly the temple is a circus
the light a drum.

– Alejandra Pizarnik

Ah! Sunflower

Ah! sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;

Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire;
Where my sunflower wishes to go.

– William Blake

But how to describe a world seen without a self?

But how to describe a world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red — even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through. How describe or say anything in articulate words again? — save that it fades, save that it undergoes gradual transformation, becomes, even in the course of one short walk, habitual — this scene also. Blindness returns as one moves and one leaf repeats another. Loveliness returns as one looks with all its train of phantom phrases. One breathes in and out substantial breath; down in the valley the train draws across the fields lop-eared with smoke.

But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and the sounds of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the picture-book had stopped and had said, ‘Look. This is the truth.’

– Virginia Woolf

Epilogue

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme-
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

– Robert Lowell

Prayer of the Atheist

Prayer of the Atheist

Hear my supplication Thou, non-existent God,
and in thy nothingness gather these my complaints,
Thou who never leavest poor men
without consolation of deceit. Thou resisteth not

our plea and our yearning thou seest.
When Thou from my mind withdraweth,
I remember again the pleasant tales
with which my nursemaid sweetened my sad nights.

How great Thou art, my God! Thou art so great
that Thou art nothing more than an Idea, it is a narrow
reality the more it expands

to embrace Thee. I suffer on thy account,
non-existent God, since were Thou to exist
I also would truly exist.

– Miguel de Unamuno

Manos