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 –
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

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

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

— Benedict Anderson

- Giorgio Agamben

- Walter Benjamin

– From Ingmar Bergman, ‘Through a Glass Darkly’

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

Suddenly the temple is a circus
the light a drum.

– Alejandra Pizarnik