Conor Dowd

Inside the dusty yellow ring the drama is enacted -
a drama of death and dissolution -
a spectacle of life in a theatre of execution.
...

Summer often finds me
Underneath a nightime sky,
Beneath revolving constellations
Some time in mid-July.
...

I arrange the telescope
in cooling night,
the half-light of retreating dusk
retreating with the thinning light
...

When a book is written
it is mine
and from time to time
(depending on my frame of mind)
...

We watch a cloud balloon into the likeness of a whale,
a comet, or the tail
od something large and quite ferocious.
Your eyes are wide, surprised, your face asks why...
...

Heron
stands rigid like an old old man,
grey and white,
deliberate and
...

Icarus the innocent,
the broken birdman felll to Earth,
who soared through sight and sound,
spellbound by the ecstacy of wind,
...

Creation came and went
and Zeus sits back
with proud and pure intent,
his world before his eyes
...

In 1492
the world emerged,
Columbus sailed the Ocean's curve,
sailed westward and beyond
...

Auden woke me from my sleep
and brought me to Icelandic deep
enchanting wells of inspiration -
...

Polyphemus screamed.
It seemed as though he'd lose his mind
behind those leaping lines of flame
between us all.
...

Mercury,
the child who never strays too far from home,
is less alone than others in the sky,
its little orbit eagerly obeyed
...

It started with a meeting on a stairs
on a Saturday in March
like that painting that I love -
you know the one in which the knight
...

Before sleep washes over me
and drags me under
to where the labyrinths of sight and sound
entrap me with their lines
...

I've been expecting you to call
and the writing on the wall tells me all I need to know -
numbered, numbered, weighed, divided -
it tells me where to go, which path to choose,
...

And in this moment now,
now everything is rich and real and vital
and slow and cinematic:
a baby's cry, a mother's tears, a host of bloody susets -
...

Freefall leap into
a night American and blue
where neon signs shed fading light
into a neon sky or dawn,
...

I stand under the shelter of an old
boat-house by the woods
as the curtains of rain smother my view,
and watch the silent cinema of nature,
...

On a vulgar city bus
eyes meet and when they do
they part abruptly,
cautious and distrustful -
...

The woods today are cool and calm
and waves creep toward the shore,
they lap and linger,
beat on beat,
...