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An Aural Triptych.

By DARAGH BREEN.

Who softly reads here what he’s written below:


1.

“the sound of horses, between the wars”

HAVING BEEN disturbed
by my opening of
a window

the magpie ascended
from behind the
rabbit’s ears

its wings lifting
turquoise, black and white
the jockey of its

own torso
leaving bald spots
where it had attacked

the rabbit’s neck
its weeping eye
and defending paw.

We sat with
the rabbit for over
an hour

a miniaturist’s pulse
thickening beneath its
robe every few seconds.

Death had saddled
it with a weight
of stars, a strange leadenness

that we felt
when we buried it
beneath the willow

where it wept
its own burrow
into the dark.

2.

“the sound of two creatures, clashing”

ONE RAISES its head and
brings it labouring down
on the other’s
and inside his blood surges
against his skull like a
wave shattering
its shell against
the stone wall of a cliff.

The other feels the shock
like the dry dead rock
of the moon
suddenly being awash,
the skull of the bull seal
drags the loose sack of rocks
of its body
to the water.

The cow seal recoils
like a retreating tide
her large skull rising
at it drags her back,
the slap and ripple, slap
and ripple of the bull’s
warping flanks rippling
against hers as he tries to pass.

The sun of his cranium has
felt the sudden urge to feel
the weightlessness of the water,
once he reaches the icy liquid
he flops and lets the whole
Solar System of himself
hang in the cold dark
like a flabby chandelier.

3.

“the sound of a Pastoral, with fallen fruit”

IN BLACK Forest costume
the sunlight wears
water lilies of shadow
beneath the trees

a wasp emerges
from the fallen
capsule of an apple,
now defunct.

Degas’ ballerina made
from stilled bees,
a stagnated sound
held in balance

backstage, behind
the screen of trees,
the season’s swan
is splayed in silence.


Daragh Breen’s most recent collection is Nostoc (Shearsman Books, 2020). His poetry has appeared extensively in Irish literary journals, and more recently in the UK in journals such as Blackbox Manifold, Tears in the Fence, Long Poem Magazine, Molly Bloom and Shearsman Magazine.

 

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