Illaunmore
I bring my islands with me, wherever,
From photos of the alps to the dark waves
Of Kawela, where beating tides severed
The lava rock from a sea which craved
Our fragile point, providing my own matter
To an ocean that never saved
A thing, but now at last much more,
Like the old green Locke I pushed
Around the lawn, lies across the water,
A reverie where the mist is drowned,
Where the lake itself is lost and found.
March 11th, 2025, Magnolia
Explanation
These tercets return to Dante’s ancient woods in the midst of a world muddled by crowds who threw away their history for a carton of eggs.
This is an elegy for a Lough, invoking our old Locke, the Rolls-Royce of lawn mowers, and Andrew Marvell’s bucolic mower poems, with a nod to Emily Dickinson, Yeats’ Innisfree, and The Lady of the Lake, summoned up by the lake isle of Illaunmore, a small farming isle with a quilt of pastures and hedgerows on Lough Derg at Coolbaun.
We bring our poems to the places we love, but sometimes the places bring the poems to us.
We never did buy that place on Lough Derg, so this is all that survives of it. It was the kind of place that would have explained everything. Without it, the world is less clear. But on the other hand, I didn’t have the energy to decide at this stage that I was finally an Irish poet. I had to face up to the fact that I’m a Mt. Kisco boy. Despite all that time in Port Talbot and in Galway, my roots are in the lawn on East Middle Patent Road in North Castle. I’m not the boyo I faked for years back when I was 15. There’s too much fertilizer under the grass.