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Man
Waking
Man
waking throws one arm
On the sure white of a bed cover,
Waits until the rhythm of his warned heart
Has tempered and dulled -
A new thing scrapes and paws
An already hurt morning, sprawling near
His square-cut garden, its neatness
A green mirroring of his taut self:
Younger, he would go on his knees,
Eyes closed, to an Absolute Good,
A kindly Otherness made flesh,
A benevolent old pensioner mad and wise.
But younger was a time of not knowing -
Now he feels the curtained sunlight
menacing in its supernatural glare,
The postman delivers ultimatums, he must
Move with caution, do nothing
To upset what there is to be upset.
Shaving,
he sees what other men see,
Ordinary terror, an honourable agony,
The terms he has agreed with himself:
The letter, the Alpha, his beginning,
Pocked against the bone, pricks his skull.
Knot
Light
off the water wears a muted blue,
Girls move by in brief surges.
A high sky thickens with seacloud: you think
You can name the quiet closing in the heart,
You believe it takes its hour like a tide -
One arm over the back of a wooden
Bench, you are the image of self-satisfaction.
A knot tightens under the tongue;
To miss her on this perfect evening
Is to be without language.
Worst Weather
The
worst weather rides out of the West
Full of bog fire and bracken ash, a rag
Of
wet wind flapping it on like a sail
Fat and dragging out of tide and seethe -
The
heartbreak of branch clawed to the bone
Is in its rising note, its skin bag of scattery
Shells,
each one an ear full of dead words,
Slaps like a wet tongue against the flank
Of
the West wind. Your finger's white
Touch, love, is colder than mountain snow.
Revelation
I
see in you
Moments of myself:
I have put them aside,
I do not look at them.
There is within me
A capacity to refuse
Even this promised
Closeness. Look at me -
On
similar days
I knew love's knifing
Joy like breath, I was
Not a coward then.
Is this wisdom,
This growing hesitant?
To walk away, alone,
Biting my lip, speechless?
^
Biography
Fred Johnston is in the process of setting up a writers' centre
in Galway. A novel, ATALANTA, has been published recently.
A 'new and selected' poems is due later this year from Lagan
Press. He founded CUIRT, Galway's annual poetry/literature
festival, in 1986. Earlier this year he received a Northern
Ireland Arts Council Bursary to work on a novel set in Africa;
and a Prix de l'Ambassade translating bursary.
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