Married to the Land

No other place I know speaks simultaneously of meadows and desert

Married to the Land

It’s as if the solid green
of the valley
were an island
held and bound
by the river flow
of stone
and when
in summer rain
white limestone
turns black
and the central green
is light-wracked
round the edges,
that dark
reflective gleam
of rock
becomes
an edging brilliance
that centers
each field
to deep emerald.

No other place
I know
speaks
simultaneously
of meadows
and desert,
absorbing dryness
and winter wet,
the ground
porous and forgiving
of all elements,
white and black,
wet and dry,
rich and barren,
like a human marriage,
one hand
of welcome
raised,
the other
tightened
involuntary
on a concealed
knife in the
necessary
protections
of otherness.

As if someone
had said, you will
learn
in this land
the same welcome
and the same exile
as you do in your
mortal vows
to another,
you will promise
yourself
and abase yourself and find yourself
again
in the intimacy
of opposites,
you will pasture yourself
in the living green
and the bare rock,
you will find
comfort in strangeness
and prayer
in aloneness,
you will be proud
and fierce
and single minded
even
in your unknowing
and you will
carry on
through all the seasons
of your living and dying
until
your aloneness
becomes equal
to the trials
you have set yourself.

Then this land
will become again
the land
you imagined
when you saw it
for the first time
and these vows
of marriage
can become
again and again
the place you
make your
residence
like
this same
rough
intimate
and cradled
ground
between
stone horizons,
embracing
and also,
like the one
to whom
you made the vows,
always beyond you,
both utterly
with you
and both
strangely beautiful
to know
by their distance.


-from The Seven Streams: An Irish Cycle, originally published as The Vows at Glencolmcille in Everything is Waiting for You

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