How slow they are

to let their one and only last attachment

to rock or weed or fellow creature

go, these mussels wrenched from

salty sleep, prised from the dark

in which they’ve led their quiet

tide-rocked lives – like any dreamer

on the verge of who knows what

active bliss or passion, but bested

by some half-thought-through

restraint, so his refrain can’t help

but be, as he wakes, that sea-blue

see-through mantra: Loss is nothing

but more to come. Wailing

daylight, then, and no two ways

about it: detachment happens.

Visitation

Last night you called me out to the December dark

to look up and see what neither of us

had ever seen before: a burnished flock of Canada geese

bent into a flexed bow and heading south

across a clear-starred moonless sky in silence,

winging it to warmer quarters and all lit up –

like mystery, I thought, a lit thing bearing nothing

but the self we see and savour, but know

no more the meaning of than I know what, in the cave

of its fixed gaze, our cat is thinking. Lit

to the shade of tarnished gold and moving as one,

they were a mystery to us: Why, we asked,

their colour, they by daylight simply black winged shapes

quickening southwards across a sky-blue canvas?

How could they be lit from below like that, from somewhere,

it seemed, near where we stood on the earth

we shared with them, staring up, the earth that for this

inhabited minute or two must have been

giving off a light that made these creatures shine for us

who were there by chance – with no moonshine

to explain it? Then they’re gone, gone on, although

in their aftermath the cold dark we stood

our ground in was, for a little while, neither cold nor dark

but a place of visitation, and we were in it.

Eamon Grennan

From But the Body, by Eamon Grennan, published by the Gallery Press