In deep bathwater I am Ophelia, mad from love,

but I have one ear on a Janet frame mnemonic -

Read over Your Greek Book In Verse - the other

cocked to baby squeals.  A quarter - tone shift,

delight to distress. and I leap, leaving water trails

like a puzzle, to bring him in.  He jerks his beaky mouth

over my breasts like a grazing Galapagos turtle,

alights on a morsel and hangs, resting an ear on my heart.

We are any mammals, the Southern Right whale and calf

glimpsed from a glider cliff in a moment like this one,

rare as hooping cranes, generous as sunshine.

You are a sleight of hand, conjured from a paper hat,

a living fossil of an ancient love.  Only you are innocent.

We count hours now, not days.

There is no plan and there are no new dreams.

I could lower blinds, curl up and scorn the light

but you are just beginning to shape a world.

You need every good thing and I must give it.

So we lie under oak leaf patterns, watching wind,

counting waves, remembering birdsong.

A bank of cloud lumbers in from the north

threatening to take the shine from autumn's equinox,

rain thieved last week from the Timor Sea

holding its breath above us, a meniscus,

fragile airborne tension waiting to break.

One cloud hangs like a zeppelin,

a trick of afternoon light turning its side to a rainbow.

Read over your Greek book in verse, I say,

and you laugh as if it's the best thing

you've heard in your life.

KINSALE

Snug town, embraced by Cork hills,

huddled from contrary Celtic Seas,

unlikely crossroads of cultures and tongues -

Gaelic, Spanish, French.  I am flotsam here

amid the virtuosity of seagulls.  I am alone,

walking with my lover whose absence is denser

than his presence was, a black hole in place of a star.

No-one notes his truancy, but I wear it

next to my skin like a scapula.  I walk the cliffs

to Old Head, to watch a solitary cutter fly

magenta sails on Courtmacsherry Bay.

I toss on a narrow bunk in a house which sprawls

like a drunk on a bench, everything hanging open.

Towels drape from windows like slack tongues.

Paddy McIntee, the owner of a shaggy body

and b7ull neck, closes bloodshot eyes on hearth

and guests, snores through the blackness

and cries out in his sleep.  In the harbour, French yachts

cluster like sheep caught in rabbit - fencing,

lone skippers drinking company in low - rafted pubs.

Next day I entertain my ego at the brilliant edge

of Kinsale Bay, below a star fortress brooding

where pincers of land all but touch

like a ballerina's fingers in a curved ache of arms.

We toast each other in cold champagne.  Watery sunshine

fizzes on our skin.  Clear water laps our table,

washed this way by a stately departure of sailors

alone by choice.  Hulls gleam like naked bodies.

Discarded silks balloon with gravid grace.

We taste salty sweat on the wind, probe filaments

of oyster flesh, as yachts pass one by one.

On the cliffs of Howth, where Maud Gonne

said no to Yeats, I explored seams in the rich mine

of their love, finding nuggets of phrase.

I met two Dublin boys, well-versed in whys and wherefores,

who bought me Guinness and treated me to jambalaya.

The taste of the sea on my tongue again, I think of how

we raised flags telling us status, position,

the minimal communication of mute yachts.

If Paddy smells my champagne breath,

he doesn't say.  He puts a finger to a temple.

When I invite a woman to The Spaniard, tired

of spectres for companions, she pushes back

a blond lock and says she's seeking solitude .

Later, we meld our loneliness with others'.

We take our breakfast together and see Paddy

nursing his, as if eggs are the only things he believes in.

We walk backroads to Ballinspittle and detour

through a graveyard where Celtic crosses stand

like so many standards above an army of the dead.

Anna calls me to read a stone, its bleak repetition

ring like chisel blows.  here lies-

Mary Agnes McIntee (nee O'Meagher) 1940-1985

Michael McINtee 1962-1985

Niamh McIntee 1965-1985

Siobahn McIntee 1970-1985

Sean McIntee 1973-1985

Beloved wife and children of Patrick Francis McIntee

Died 17th September 1985 - Lost at sea

May they rest in peace

We stand before glassy marble cut with gold

till the air quietens and grows dark.  The sound of the sea

climbs up and over fields.  We turn back.

Paddy nods as we go inside but our tongues

have turned to marble.  All night we work them

over lines of Yeats, then over each other.

In the morning we part, take separate paths,

leaving the way we arrived

THE WEIGHT OF LONGING

After the funeral we sleep in the single bed

I dreamed in all my growing years.  You sleep

soundly, as always.  I cry.  Hot tears spill

along your breastbone to gather in clavicle hollow,

a Japanese waterway on your chest.  You never

see my tears, only channel them away.

The bed bears a tracery of tufted cotton - 

childhood chenille.  We sleep outside of space - time,

in a vice-like embrace at the end of the earth,

the end of a life.  We make love.  In Europe

it was fields, orchards, beaches, the back

of your van, dark alleys.  Familiar loving

becomes a wormhole in space: we crawl

through to inhabit the known.  Already

the wear of hard reality has frayed familiarity,

baring warp and weft, leaving pattern unclear.

You want something.  I, too.  The bed's unsung

bargaining is swept beneath ragged edges

of our short past.  There is a keenness, too-

something thrilling.  In young years I never took a lover

to my girlhood bed.  My fingers kneaded,

a pillow's weight on girl-hips never enough.

I dreamt the dream of the faceless saviour,

a comic book romance.  Now I have sneaked

a lover into my girlhood, to do the longed-for,

beautiful things.  The weight of that room's longing,

lust and grief, is such that bubbles pop in our joints

and we must surface slowly into frosty dawnlight.

Your garden, completing jobs my mother began - 

digging, pruning, turning seed beds for spring planting.

You tidy white-pebbled flower-beds.  I moon.

I sort.  I pack or give away.  I discover splinters of a life

I knew, letters from a daughter long gone,

inexplicable mementoes.  I turn them in my hands,

searching for connection.  I have been away too long.

I am not now my mother's daughter.

We move to her room, heady with mother-smell.

My parents' bed is slatted with Tasmanian-oak

for my father craved solidity.  The bedhead is veneer`

and formica: my mother was concerned

with appearances.  I lay fresh sheets

and encase sad pillows in ironed shrouds.

I turn down her bedcover.  I put on her bedlight.

There is a shift of air neighbours notice.

I am afraid I will wake, put on my mother's dressing gown

and slippers, make coffee with full-cream milk.  I am afraid

I will survey the garden and the fridge

to  see what needs attention today.  I am afraid.

Fear fuels our lovemaking: it is furious not tender,

beating back demons and cold dread.  Orgasms

clear a breathing space beneath the ice.

It is not carefree.  But it is careless.

You create a scarecrow for raspberries

from discarded odds and ends, and frustration

with my lethargy.  When I look from the kitchen window

I see a crazed, heartless thing.  You have done your bit - 

made love and held me.  You have come

to the end of the earth.  What more did I expect

from this lover-becoming- stranger.  I want to ask,

Where to from here?  But I don't know where he is.

I walk circles in the house, the garden, my head.  I fall

into my mother's bed with you and your scarecrow,

and the neighbours nodding.  I am hollow

as a gourd.  Knock, and I echo, resound like a drum.

Kick, and I roll drunkenly away.  Your scarecrow shouts,

prods then kicks.  You need noise, reaction, anything

other than this gourd, this making love to a hollow vessel,

trying to fill my void.  Curses and blows fall

like west-coast rain, obliterating, and now

neighbours houses listen, shocked walls reeling.

I can't raise my head.  I deserve it.

Houses gossip, one to another,

like wind whispering tree to tree, and others know.

Someone comes and sends you on your way,

nursing wounds.  But I want stigmata,

something to show for all the pain, not this gourd-skin,

smooth and reliable.  The bruises have almost gone

by the time I know I pregnant.

A blue cross emerges on virgin-white - a smudged tattoo,

a small neat bruise.  A plus sign.  Positive from negative;

something out of nothing: presence out of absences,

her going and his going, different goings, but both gone

from my life.  I blink in ruthless bathroom-mirror light,

my face erratic as a loosed balloon.  Glass splinters

fall toward me, shards of accusing light coruscate,

daggers glint, fracture edges of my vision.  I wake,

crumpled and cold, in the bathtub and wonder,

puzzled, if I have been murdered.

Now my baby kicks, seeking space, or his sea legs.

I guess his unscarred consciousness.  I feel his head

above the beady knot of navel.  There is an indent,

beneath a thin layer of our tissue, perhaps eye socket,

perhaps mouth.  I stop probing.  I smooth

my soccer-ball belly to turn him round.  Head down

I want him, to dive into life, fontanelles delicate

between skull bones gnashing like plates of earth's crust,

rupturing, renting, cataclysmic.  He kicks as I fall asleep,

my hand and arm absorbing tiny blows:

he is my sleeping draught, my candle.

In the morning he knocks to wake me up: he is my chanticleer