DENNIS MORIARTY

DENNIS

MORIARTY

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Fox, crow, lamb, vain ladies and lastly pike are all subject matter of Ted Hughes poems.

Caffeine and poetry, early morning

Stimuli.

A deck warm with sunshine and

Bird song,

A triple shot latte, the collected poems

Of Ted Hughes

And me poised at the entrance of

Another world.

I enter browsing the archives

Of a poem

And all at once I sense him beside me,

Poet at my shoulder

Reading his work aloud,

Millstone grit, granite, the geology

Of his language.

Poems hardened off and nurtured on

The nursery slopes of Yorkshire.

Each word delivered in the raw close up

In your face

Lethal as a bullet trajectory of a windswept

Moor.

I find myself at a starless window watching

A fox gather his thoughts,

Listen, on the edge of a tear, to a lamb

Too feeble to stand,

Perch with crow in the high tops, all of

Creation beneath us.

Hearing the sharp intake of breath of

Vain ladies

Catching sight of their faces in mirror's

Of oak.

I mark the page, drink some coffee

And already

His presence is fading, his voice snatched

By a curlew

And trailed across light years of windswept

Moors.

I close the book, drain the cup, the caffeine

Affording me one last vision.

A pike, perfect pike in every way, navigating

The channel

Between his world and mine.

A VOICE BY CANDLE LIGHT.

Not for the first time I find myself

Listening to your voice

In that room that smells of cheap scent

And stale port wine

Where a solitary candle squats in a saucer

Of it's own mortality.

Though the structure of your voice is no longer

Of architectural importance

It still looms like a derelict monument to

The past.

I don't join in, ask a question and I dare not

Answer you back

Even though I'm well aware you can no longer

Render me mute

With a single glance nor dissect my words with

A sneer as sharp as a scalpel.

For the truth is I'm lost between then and now

And not for the first time

I find myself fast forwarding your voice until

Your words scatter

Like stars suddenly pursued by an atomic

Cloud of dust.

When the dust clears I find myself pinching

The candle's wick

Between damp thumb and finger,

Surprised by it's lack of resistance and it's

Brief angry hiss,

Thin ribbons of smoke rising like the last breaths

Expelled from your collapsing lungs

And with every flicker your eye's are drained

Of a little more light

Until only darkness and I remain in that room

Smelling of cheap scent

And stale port wine and the frazzled intestines

Of a candle.

THE PURITY OF SOUND

At first you are left stranded

On the precipice of denial.

Then you imagine that you have imagined

The sound.

Between you the distance makes the sound

Incoherent,

If indeed it is a sound at all.

You walk up through bracken tips and

Seed heads of grass

On a brown stalk of the hillside,

The sound, for you agree now that it is

A sound,

Recalculating the distance between you.

You come to an abrupt halt,

Startled by the effervescence of your reflection

In the swirling pool of a mountain stream.

The accent of water is musical

And you watch mind deep in the music

Of violin and cello and viola,

The sharp acoustics of a string quartet attaining

New highs in a deserted auditorium.

You step forward, kneel down almost reverently

As if the stream

Were now an altar of flickering sunlight on which

All sound is blessed.

You offer your hands, cupping the clean notes

Of the water,

Tasting the purity of it's sound.

DENNIS

MORIARTY.

DENNIS MORIARTY is fifty five years old and lives in South Wales, UK. He co owns a small business with his wife. Dennis enjoys walking in the mountains, writing poetry and reading, listening to music. He has five children and five grand children. Last year he won the Blackwater poetry competition and read his work at the Blackwater international poetry festival in Cork, Ireland.