The rod
is my antenna,
from its tip
the long line extends
taut
to the water's surface,
descends
sensitive
into the unseen.

I wait and feel.

It comes, essentially,
to this:
attendance ~
keeping light tension
between
supporting shore
and the water's possibility,
suspended,
while things pass on their way ~

bird-lift from reed fringe,
the sky cloud-carrying,
hills holding
the lake's moving mirror;
in time
such things may near,
perhaps, enter . . .

Cast again,

openness
being never absolute,
being nothing
if not in the end:
that is,

the sudden visit, 
rod galvanised and,
after play's close craft,
the speckled fish, 
lured from the invisible,
there,
landed.
 
 

Cork's Lough
 

The kind of motion and place of the body 
are determined according to the nature 
of the body. - Heidegger on Aristotle's De caelo

Tangentially
the sustained crash of iron passage traffic of encased bodies liberating thissamebody from anywhere into anywhere a line covers nothing this line's notends extend notyetforever science too slow we must learn from the artists and accelerate that is exchange anything this strip of violence but entropy but inertia but if 
if you can spare a time 
here it curves away 
into closure 
(as when a line 
returns to itself, 
that is, a body) -
here is a reserve.

Salutary round,
on the water's green girdle
easy concourse
of geese and pedestrian,
freewheeling cyclist,
recyclist, epicyclist,
past meditative anglers,
eyeing the other 
element's 
occluding body,
a turn of bodies
reveal at their own pace
the around-each-curve,
as the breeze enters
with hermetic birds
and the leaves utter
that once
in holiday weather
Pearse rising Corkonian Corkery:
'you'd think they'd drain it.'

Overlooking,
the 1950s 
windows
are blinded,
but only kind sunshine enters
this unused hollow
to light the swans' self-ceremonies,
the parabolising tennis ball
lifted from a hurley,
metabolism
of shouts across distance
of brightness off water
of green lounging
of the birds' ascents
and descents
of the hidden source
of the island's dark thicket
setting 
freedom;
so tell the roamers
that they are welcome
but there is one law:
that every carp or rudd 
they pierce 
and lift towards 
a gasping death
must be returned to life.

Night's return
starts the mirrored illuminations
and beams lance
on the reconstituted waters,
seize momentarily
the duck's form,
the near trunk,
something on the water
in one sweep.
But the floating 
swan remains
a pale cypher
and the dark island 
recedes, gathers
in upon itself
a hunched obscurity.
Only stewards cross
to the moist entangled
nesting ground,
treading soft-footed around
the eggs' mottled
microcosms.
In the dead season
they place at its edge
the image of a child
in view of the city's
transposition 
exposed, 
open-armed 
in the cold
to the firmament's
slow silent 
revolution. 
 
 

Triptych for Breda

I. New Media

Time merely expanding ~
the roar
of air sucked-in
after lightning.

We adapt,
locals who present 
small effigies
before the altars
of the conqueror.

Strange coupling ~
by night
upon the nymph,
helpless in distraction,
a bloodless Zeus
huge
descending.
 

II.  Refugees

Presented ~
not them,
the ever-returning ones,
poet and revolutionary and saint,
not them,
but their traces ~
the street-soiled blanket,
styrofoam containers
already abandoned
by morning's
mobilisation.

The war is always
elsewhere ~
beyond the screen,
in night-vision,
updating . . .

But an absent storm
may still deposit
evidence,
sea-fingered,
on our spreading shores ~
charred remains
sticky with oil,
difficult to classify,
to be catalogued,
nonetheless ~
since every thing
and every part of thing
will finally be housed,
in order
in order

In a disused factory
about a heap of clothes,
about a felt tent,
world-tribe gathering,
gathering
to disperse,
gathering
to disperse ~
systole, diastole,
about a hearth of ashes.

It is enough,
enough 
for a dry circulation,
enough to spark,
in its tight harness,
the galvanic movements
of the body politic.
 

III. 

Science
            fiction:
delicious edge
of the wordless creed.
Here! I have an image ~
machines conflict corpses conflict machines
of course.
Do I mix my genres?
tribes, generations,
fantastically promiscuous
spreading
over boundaries
over figurings
over all divisions of things.
Do you set an order?
That order is death.
What is the first term?
. . . delicious edge.