David Hawkins’
poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Chelsea, Poems & Plays, and The Southeast Review.
His first book, Dark Adaptations, was selected by Allen Grossman as the first runner-up in the 2008 Bellday Books poetry prize and is the recipient of the ’08 Utah Arts Council prize for a collection of poems.
He currently teachs both graduate and undergraduate courses in the University of Utah’s Writing Program.
—Back to Orsorum Contents/Issue Links—
|
The Island
i
For each pinched knuckle of his right hand,
Skellig’s rocks, for the left, the Blasket chain,
bristled with oak and sea-rotten brake
like freckled flesh. In his cupped palm, the Ring
of Kerry where once he ate sole rubbed
with coarse salt and cooked on the bone, then
washed it back with muddy stout. From one dark eye
the Blackwater runs, and each finger,
whittled to an auger, a piling propped
against the quay. Erye square, in pink feldsparred granite,
glaciered to Galway, where Fitzstephen once hung
his guilty son, rests on his furrowed brow,
while Clifden flats, where bog and hummocky hills,
rent with stones, the veld of low grasses turning
in the clay—like carpet pages from the Book of Kells—
endlessly unfold toward the milky strand.
ii
Behind bones thrust up like the Cloigtech
at Glendalough or the corbelled temple
at Kilmore, surrounded once by wattled huts
and simple tombs with Ringerike crosses,
below the Iron Duke’s bridge (cast in Coalbrooke)
where waits the trenchant small black tongue,
behind incisors rising like the Cashel
at Staigue or limestone embankments
and cheval-de-frise at Dun Aengus, where air
and corves are filled with peat and the treacly
smoke of turf fires, past the mortarless
drystone walls of Ferns—where MacMurrough
ruined even the worms—coiling about
the white-faced cottages of Drumcliffe
like sooty veins of black chert stone,
lies the poet, beneath Bulben’s bony pate.
|
