WEBVTT

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In a poem called
Ballydavid Pier--

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Ballydavid Pier is--

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Ballydavid is a small village
in County Kerry in Ireland.

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It's in an Irish-speaking area.

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It's a most beautiful,
desolate, poverty-stricken,

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full-of-history kind of place.

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And on one wonderful
summer afternoon there,

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something that I saw floating in
the harbor of Ballydavid Pier,

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and which I couldn't
identify for quite some time,

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became the subject
for this poem.

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"Noon.

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The luminous tide
climbs through the heat,

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covering gray shingle.

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A film of scum searches first
among litter, cloudy with--

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I remember-- life.

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Then crystal-clear shallows
cool on the stones,

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silent with shells and
claws, white fish bones.

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Farther out, a bag of flesh,
fetus of goat or sheep,

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wavers below the surface.

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Allegory forms of itself--

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the line of life
creeps upward replacing

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one world with another.

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The welter of its advance
sinks down into clarity.

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Slowly, the more foul
monsters of loss digest.

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Small monster of true flesh
brought forth somewhere

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in bloody confusion and error,
and flung into bitterness,

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blood washed white.

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Does that structure satisfy?

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The ghost tissue
hangs unresisting

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in allegorical waters,
lost in self-search,

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a swollen blind brow humbly
crumpled over budding limbs,

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unshaken by the spasms
of birth or death.

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The Angelus-- faint
bell-notes from some church

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in the distance
tremble over the water.

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It is nothing.

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The vacant harbor is
filling, it will empty.

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The misbirth touches the surface
and glistens like quicksilver."

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