'Don't End With History Or The Sea'

a poet warns us, or you'll make each thing
'sound like everything else.'

Here, above Blackrock, everything slopes
to that great, warped lens.
Buildings stand in the way, borrow the light.

Stars, of course, and mountains, heavens and hells
can rattle like anything else.

Days, nights, when there is nowhere better to look,
I sometimes drive there, park at a low wall
in Sandycove or Seapoint,

to write or just sit, long enough to take home
equilibrium, one little bucket of history
slopping gently on whatever scales

register these things.


from my third collection, Fade Street, forthcoming from Salt Publishing in 2010

NB
Image is of Howth, succumbing to yet more rain.
The poet quoted is the American, Kenneth Koch.