Anam Cara

Chosen

‘The familiar, precisely because it is familiar,

remains unknown.’

Hegel

I

She has become

a country woman,

arms brawny,

hair mangled

in a greasy cap,

features winnowed,

eyes accustomed,

gestures gapped.

She can now bring

the hazel stick down

raw over warm

animals’ backs,

empty cows’ dugs

into galvanized buckets,

wheaten the yard corner

for gossipy hens.

II

Impaled in fright,

she has keened

the tender ground

of paddocked night,

learned to become

immune within

when the flailing begins

in search of relief

then falls aside

lost in sleep.

III

In the sunday church

the same pale priest

winds dead talk

in dark wreathes

around their minds.

The spotless host

baked by some nun

is fit for altar

not for table,

bread of the white life.

Nor does the wine body

any languid remembrance

of swelling sun,

bottled for the altar

in a stone abbey

by an enclosed order.

Later, special offers

written on the windows

of the local store,

and just inside the door

milk-skinned models

leer in coy surprise

from covers of tabloids.

IV

Under the frame

of their stubborn farm

a stream has catacombed,

won echo-room

to hear its pilgrim mind

decipher the intention

of freed fossiled stone,

mingle the memory

of tendril and bone,

touch the turbulence

of the unknown,

unchosen clay,

in the forbidden region,

where light and form

have nothing to say.

She is often drawn

along its rumble line

to the spring well

where its face

appears to form.

She likes to sit,

watch the cattle come,

one by one;

each huge head

for a while

conceals the well,

gleans its fill,

will gaze with dark

moon eyes ever

deeper there,

as if astonished

at the water veil.

Some extend her

that oracled stare

of animal to human;

then turn around again

to graze the ground.

V

Since what is

gradual becomes less

and less visible,

she noticed most

the early hurt.

She came first

graceful, young

fell in soon

with farmwork.

Love only made her

more lonely still,

for herself and for him,

his breath on her skin,

his surge filling her

to empty himself

of the unease

that love kindled

between them.

Then, one day

within her

the raw beat

relented.

Suddenly

she saw herself

forever marooned

between land and man.

She went in haste

to a woman down the road

to tell what had become

too wearisome to hold.

That night in the pub

someone hung around

her husband’s conversation,

watched for the lull

to flick the insinuation.

After this

she turned from

her torn song

and learned the hum

that hid everyone.

VI

No blind hubris

did this to her

No royal desire for

the oil of gladness

nor robes fragrant

with aloes and myrrh

just a tender

wish to nourish

a golden gleam

his touch first

sung awoke

in her womb.

Who could wonder

if somewhere deep

in an oak drawer

she kept the whole time

something intimate

maybe a silk chemise

and dreams a dance

to banish distance

and moistly with musk

entice, entrance?