FANNY HOWE

THREE IN EIRE

1.
Where, if I go far enough, will I find a sacred place?

On the terraced gardens of the Barrington estate?
The family left when their daughter was shot by the IRA.

Now a Bible garden is here—myrrh, Judas Tree, artichokes, marjoram that blows
from bed to bed, all the spices from the Bible, extra horse flies that bite, and a
huge tumbling fig tree.

I am among the Benedictines again.

The sun and St. John’s Wort
produce the fragrance of a candle burning inside a honeycomb.

The monks will cook and offer me food from childhood:
Mashed potatoes with grilled tomatoes
Blackened haddock, boiled potatoes,
Overcooked string beans, peas.
Curried chicken, rice.
Soup made from potatoes and vegetable of the day before.
Green soup.
Rice pudding with bitter hot applesauce.
Brown bread, butter and black currant jam.
Gooseberry and marmalade.
Sausages and black pudding.

…

The nights are damp and cold, I am sleepless still.
Yet missed Matins.
And drank tea with more milk than usual.
Brothers Malachy, Ciaran, Patrick, Terence, Simon,
Then Berna, Alice, Sue and I convene in the meditation room.

In The Rule it says: “The Abbess should always remember
What she is and what she is called.
Let her understand also
What a difficult and arduous task she has undertaken:
Ruling souls and adapting herself to a variety of characters.”

Now the bees are coming in the window from the yellow flowers that are like mallow.

Ciaran and I took a long walk in the summer sun.
Tennis courts, meadows, woods and ducking under electrified wires to get to the rust
brown lake. One dreams into a book a day like this, made of grass and nothing else.
At supper tonight he played the Goldberg Variations that I bought for him while his
Brothers ate chicken croquettes in silence.

Yogananda believes that the Word is consciousness, it is a seed implanted in the person.
A word is a vibratory presence.

I think a sentence is a long word.
But does each word in a sentence anticipate the next word, having been anticipated by the
one before? Are words to sentences what letters are to words?
What have I been doing all these years?

Why does this matter unless it reveals something about the structure of the universe.

Bread and drink and soup are the staples here.
Still, the Irish brought potatoes to Idaho.

In the library Brother Andrew Cyprian Love the organist explains my poems to me per-
fectly. He is the one who wrote: “Subject and system are sublated by a single circular
movement, but one which also spirals forward, as the improviser, spinning his
metaphysic of utopia, presses the whole liturgy, rite and participants in one, towards the
future.”

Cosmic vibrations tremble the sanctuary’s green cloth over the host. A red candle
is burning across an oriental rug, there is an animal Irish-Celtic design on the altar:
I know that the best thing for others might be happening because I am not there.

As in cut, pare, prune, reduce, mine.

Still pills to sleep before I move on.

2.
All activity was religious in 6th-7th century Northern India. Cooking, eating, bathing,
sleeping.
Even poetry was a form of yoga with self-realization as its goal.
“The whole of speech is Brahman.”

There was a cyclical, not a linear, view of reality, the cosmos, creation.
Seed-flower-seed.
These become a rhythm forever. “A rhythm not composed by the intellect.”

One very old grammarian (when he was young) says the whole is prior to the parts…
The word is subsumed by the sentence, the sentence by the paragraph and so on. But no
words have existence without a brain organizing them and then speaking (generating)
them and being heard (recognized) by someone else.
Words like the air itself are infinite and have no beginning or end.

Can you separate the gold from the ring?
A cloth of variegated color is like a sentence that is composed of different units and now
they are one thing.
What is uttered aloud by a speaker awakens the sleeper who hears.
The two share their understanding and each behold the same sleeper speaking
between them.
This is consciousness: what is asleep and what is shared.
How is it shared? On the air. Sound cannot exist without air. Sound is an attribute of
air.

Words end in silence when the sentences have reached clarity.
Only at the end can you recognize their meaning.

Why does any of this matter? Because the structures of language and sound offer one
more way to get close to Atman-Brahman.
They reveal secrets by which you can reach enlightenment and live in the universe
without fear.
The Color of Fluid in a Pea-Hen’s Egg becomes a Feathered Fan.

3.
In the perfumery, you can have a shot of tea among
As many grays as there are levels, and under a huge wedge tomb on a hill.

Mild sun into evening.
Makuru, carrying fire from one camp to the next, like dreams.

In Milltown Malbay, trad music in a pub, a windy night, pale pink fuchsia fluttering,
clouds of different densities layer under the near-full moon.

Being between-things, I thought about improvisation and Simone Weil’s metaxu.
Also about descending from monkeys and ascending to air.
We should not think less of humans but more of animals if they are in our DNA.

An old desolate hotel on the beach was facing west to America, rocky but flat and a
banner flapping.
Summer bungalows for lease.

Where are the little people of Ireland?
They are the elfin Santas at Shannon Airport. Robots with realistic hideous faces.

Is this what was carried from the megalithic household ring, the laborious stones.
Shapes primordial from dull comprehension, each circle and wedge
resulting in lots of muscle pain?

A plastic ice cream cone with a whirling vanilla spiral stands on village corners.
Looks delicious and archetypal.

A ring fort wall, the elderberry bush, might offer shelter for kid goats and lambs, like
an imagined animal pen, I wonder if these are sacred.

Is each line of a poem a complete and solitary unit; or is it anticipation, improvement?