Three Poems by Eamon Grennan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Order Eamon Grennan's
RELATIONS:
New & Selected Poems
at Amazon.com

APPROXIMATING

To step on a flyswarm and be borne into the aether
of bonescramble, stew of matter, or into a distance of invisibility
where only the goldfinch who inhabits honey locusts
or the warbler whose home is oak barrens and burns of dry brush
will send small voices after you through the dusk.

To gather out of the returned gaze an early crop: a woman
carrying armfuls  of tulips to her husband's door.To see
two dark-targeted breasts in the bedroom mirror, a ghost-white coat
floating through the canyon's shadow and waited for
in a lake of sunlight, every stretched second drawing her closer,
and the sense strengthening of approximation.  

To believe in shadowlight, a body moving through it
feeling the sun in her eyes, the ground steady under her feet,
although all night the thick-lipped angels of pain will have clamped their
rebuking elbows to the windowsill, all night knuckled their thunderhead
brows against the one window shuttered against them.


PEACE

To be wakened by the wren's busy clicking,
the dry splash a spray of ash leaves makes
dropping on the grass.

Frantic and tranquil by turns, the sound of bees
rises and falls around the eaves,
concocting sweetness.

Things to be as neat as the two green hemispheres
of an almond: you put the knife in
and out pops the heart.

To pad around together in the old robes, feeling
any minute now things will begin
to begin in earnest,

and not to think of the middle passage: the parting
of a pair of wild geese
lost in clouds.


DIVERS

In this calm pre-dawn yellow light a family

of eider ducks—their black and white plumage
stark, their rounded heads solid against
the burst of brightness—is diving for breakfast
in the golden, fire-fangled waters of the bay.

Compact as handfuls, their bodies make small
slap-gurgle sounds as they tilt, rise a little, slip
under the surface sleek as oil and delicately rippled
with the merest blue breath of wave-motion.

Bobbing back to light they seem like new-born
creatures of the morning, shake their heads and
gaze round at things as for the first time, alive
in the first firewater, then sliding under it again.

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EAMON GRENNAN is an Irish citizen and the Dexter M. Ferry, Jr. Professor of English at Vassar College. His previous books include What Light There Is & Other Poems, As If It Matters, So It Goes, and his translation, Leopardi: Selected Poems. Grennan is the recipient of a Guggenheim and a NEA fellowship. His work has appeared in many Irish and American journals, including the New Yorker, Poetry Ireland Review, the Nation, Poetry, and the Threepenny Review.



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