Eamon Grennan is an Irish citizen and the author of several collections of poetry, including Still Life with Waterfall, winner of the Lenore Marshall Award, and What Light There Is and Other Poems, a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His Leopardi: Selected Poems won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He has received several Pushcart Prizes, as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Grennan is the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English at Vassar College.
Anemones Beheld by Rachel
How not look again at these vased anemones whose thirsty stems
__________drink up water for their ceremony of reds purples pinks all dying
for light oozing through our dining-room window and all (look you)
__________living for the moment in it and for the moment after that as if on fire?
Surprise
(for Conor)
Let me take note before it’s too late of the sparrow that just touched
__________down on the yellow scaffold cladding the ruins of a tenement these
tough sweat-men are either tearing down or tensely refurbishing
__________and perches there and goes still as in a grove of trees feeling
the feeling we’d call safety and bringing me once again to the meeting
__________between this big world with its cast-iron clamour-matter and those
small creature-comfort light-winged things that wake us by surprise
__________so something as simple as the taste of that apple (one of the best
you’d ever tasted) let the thought of God you told me once
__________come over you with the night coming down and bad weather closing in
so you’d have been penned in those mountains for months or worse
__________and no one to know it when out of the blue in that cavern-black dark
came strangers bearing gifts–a key and the comfort of good talk and a warm
__________space for the night and (Thanks God!) that unforgettable apple.
Gone
The little house grows quiet now she’s gone from it
__________so he’ll set small orange embers of montbretia in a vase
before the bedroom mirror although its petals can behold
__________no more than themselves in the cold truth-telling glass.
Day Dream
Not finding her earlobes sufficient to make love to he sinks to kissing
__________the backs of her knees bare as peeled tree bark behind a bright curtain
of flowers all in a high-pitched ring fashioned from hum and buzz as
__________dark-ringed bees and green-gilded flies fill fuchsia hedges with their
long-term sun sonata though when he wakes it’s only the blackbird with her
golden beak and Fury’s eye keeps vigil over what’s left of midday’s
__________dreamfeast: the burnish of leftover breadcrumbs among rainbright stones.
Moon Doings in Renvyle
Through flawlessly pewtered air this moonlight night
__________casts soft-edge shadows while the lake’s a whitish gleam
and overhead the Dipper etches in starpoint its enormous
__________extraterrestrial implement and grass grows a shade of grey
recalling what daylight does to operatic cloudbanks
__________and across open fields brimming with silver-smitten
shapes of thornbushes and sycamore leaves and spiny
__________stilled rushes a single whitewashed cottage glows.
The Readiness Is All
Imagine being bright and unencumbered in the here and now and
__________seeing simply through your window the lace of misty rain
drawn across Letter Hill by a sou’wester and in the near field
__________how the bull gently nudges the cow his favorite among the herd
and she rises to her knees first then stands in her silky sheen
__________and they move off nonchalantly together–or imagine waking
out of some crowded dreamscape into this play of light over
__________the garden that’s empty of everything except the long intake
and let-out of windbreath among the leaves with shaft after
__________shaft of green light breaking in silence across the grass as
you leave one otherworld for another in the here and now you find
__________bright but as encumbered as ever so you must simply
in silence set your sights on what simply is and adjust to it.
The Galway Review 