ANNE

Anne,
It was a dream you only will understand.
We are driving in a trap
blinkered
the high-stepping pony
so it can't stop
at the wayside temptations
of sweet grass and flowers
It's springtime
with white clouds and grey clouds
and teasing breezes
Shadow and sun
play at your neck
as your breasts strain
to have the hot breath
and the cold breath
alternate upon them.
The hedges are thickening
and sighing
as the wind
moves between
the trembling limbs
before a sudden shower.

We sit in a trap
driven along by our past

It was only a dream you understand.

CROAGH PATRICK

I will find the time
to serve Mass on the penal mount
Scrabbling about on the shale
putting new meaning
into the word backsliding.
I found the rain merciless
on the face of the mountain
as it lashed my own
in a flagellation as coarse
as any hair shirt

A throcaire De go sabhala tu me
Sweet mercy of God save me.
Incense rises from the bay
in plumes and billows and sprays
of yellow furze and wild fuchsia.
The host is as dry as a flake of stone
and brings no earthly relief
and beer would be a better blood
than the sweet Lachrima Christi.
I'd do the time on Lough Derg
to prepare for the spirit
of the wildly glorious slopes
of slanting rain and sleet
and nights blackened
by the doubt clouds
banked one on top of the other,
a rumbling stratocumulus
of thundering indiscretions
and lightning impulses.

Dapping Time

Out on the lake
A single rowboat
Smoothed the drowsy surface
An ebony boss
On a silver shield
A single angler
Dapped fat mayflies
On a line of floss
Dropping them like dandelion seeds
On the quivering water
A rhythmic tide of cast and receive.
A trout, sleek with guile
And golden-red spots
Scrutinised the offerings
And then the boil
And roll of the noiseless rise
Before the jagging strike
The fight was a tug-of-war
Neither yielding much and slowly
But when the fatigue
Of frantic head tossing
Failed to dislodge the barb
Surrender loomed
With the creamy gut
Catching the light of the moon.

His fingerprints aren't in the database

The ridges and whorls on the fingers
had been so perfecfly preserved
that had they previously been printed
the marks would soon have revealed
the identity of a headless, legless body
entombed in the brown waters of Croghan.

Was he a king
whose wife and fields were barren.
Was he a poet whose satires sorely aggrieved.
Was he a hunter whose geasa were ignored.
He was certainly a giant
Whose looks may have beguiled a queen.

But he was impaled through the arms
onto a wicker frame,
then strung up by his feet
embracing the cradle of death
a pedulum of profanity and propitiation
swinging from a straining oak.

When struck by dull iron bone shatters
and sinews are hacked and gouged.
The head and trunk were crudely severed
the bowels spilled on to the gound.
The eyes were plucked by grey crows,
a screeching badb revelling in the charnel place.

The legs were left to the wolves
whose whelps grew fierce on the marrow
and the skewered head was flayed
by sun and wind 'til the jaw fell
from the spear
impaling the head to a tree.

Jim Cannon


Jim Cannon was born and educated in Ireland and migrated to Australia in 1977. His early writing influences were W. B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Padraig Pearse and Seamus Heaney. Jim works as a General Practitioner at the University of Ballarat and The Ballarat and District Aboriginal Cooperative.

E-mail: Jim Cannon