#eamon grennan

Holding only a handful of rushlight they pressed deeper into the dark, at a crouch until the great rock chamber flowered around them and they stood in an enormous womb of flickering light and darklight, a place to make a start. Raised hands cast flapping shadows over the sleeker shapes of radiance.

They've left the world of weather and panic behind them and gone on in, drawing the dark in their wake, pushing as one pulse to the core of stone. The pigments mixed in big shells are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries and the binding juices oozed out of chosen barks. The beasts

begin to take shape from hands and feather-tufts (soaked in ochre, manganese, madder, mallow white) stroking the live rock, letting slopes and contours mould those forms from chance, coaxing rigid dips and folds and bulges to lend themselves to necks, bellies, swelling haunches, a forehead or a twist of horn, tails and manes curling to a crazy gallop.

Intent and human, they attach the mineral, vegetable, animal realms to themselves, inscribing the one unbroken line everything depends on, from that impenetrable centre to the outer intangibles of light and air, even the speed of the horse, the bison's fear, the arc of gentleness that this big-bellied cow arches over its spindling calf, or the lancing dance of death that bristles out of the buck's struck flank. On this one line they leave a beak-headed human figure of sticks and one small, chalky, human hand.

We'll never know if they worked in silence like people praying—the way our monks illuminated their own dark ages in cross-hatched rocky cloisters, where they contrived a binding labyrinth of lit affinities to spell out in nature's lace and fable their mindful, blinding sixth sense of a god of shadows—or whether (like birds tracing their great bloodlines over the globe) they kept a constant gossip up of praise, encouragement, complaint.

Even in this sharp weather there are lovers everywhere holding onto each other, hands in one another’s pockets for warmth, for the sense of I’m yours, the tender claim it keeps making—one couple stopping in the chill to stand there, faces pressed together, arms around jacketed shoulders so I can see bare hands grapple with padding, see the rosy redness of cold fingers as they shift a little, trying to register through fold after fold, This is my flesh feeling you you’re feeling.

It must be some contrary instinct in the blood that sets itself against the weather like this, brings lovers out like early buds, like the silver-grey catkins I saw this morning polished to brightness by ice overnight. Geese, too: more and more couples voyaging north, great high-spirited congregations taking the freezing air in and letting it out as song, as if this frigid enterprise were all joy, nothing to be afraid of.

It must be some contrary instinct in the blood that sets itself against the weather like this, brings lovers out like early buds, like the silver-grey catkins I saw this morning polished to brightness by ice overnight. Geese, too: more and more couples voyaging north, great high-spirited congregations taking the freezing air in and letting it out as song, as if this frigid enterprise were all joy, nothing to be afraid of.

world word

What over the gable-end and high up under tangled cloud that raven might be saying to its tumble-soaring mate or what the blackbird might intend when chattering among scattered breadcrumbs or what the bellowing of one cow then another in the near field might mean remains beyond my ken—being all noise for which no words will manage though all is language settling and unsettling the world beyond me . . . and yet there’s the dunnock in all its dun colours at work among the small stones and patchy grass of the driveway and here’s the robin’s aggressive tilt at breadcrumbs and there goes the sudden shriek of the blackbird . . . all alive inside the inhuman breath-pattern of the wind trawling every last leaf and blade of grass and flinging rain like velvet pebbles onto the skylight: nothing but parables in every bristling inch of the out-of-sight unspoken never-to-be-known pure sense-startling untranslatable there of the world as we find it.

Eamon Grennan

Procurando pedras raras, dei com a lontra mortaapodrecendo na linha da maré, e carreguei pelo resto do dia o odor desta brutaldespedida. Aquele som lancinante e agudo do ostraceiroecoava pela enseada rochosaonde um cormorão se alimentava e submergia na baíae de onde uma garça-real alçou voo de um rochedo onde estivera invisível,pairou um tempo, e pousou outra vez – um hieróglifoou apenas a…