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Eamon Grennan
Agnostic Smoke
Open daisies in the grass, stars in the sky, that half-barrel
and the birds on it, or the silvery steely slate blue skin
of a mackerel: honeycomb of spider lines and diamonds
and inside in close-up, look, royal blue. Where do birds
go nights, or buff-colored heifers up to their bellies in buttercups,
who haul as if nothing the great weight of themselves
to lake edge and back, sinking beyond their bony hocks
in the boggy grass, the brushed green rushes making
a sound like raincoats? Nothing but blues of space
waiting my agnostic praise, but from my chimney too,
Lord, the smoke goes up (turf-scented and the scent
of wood), though this is after rapture, when even
the sight of a pheasant crossing the morning garden
briskly, like a man on business, can’t trigger whatever
the celebratory nerve was—it’s only the eye just looking,
as a tree might look, intending nothing beyond
being there, breaking daylight into little brilliant bits
to become itself in every instant: barked, branched, alive
with leaf-light: countless its ways of being, being like that.
EAMON GRENNAN teaches at Vassar College. His most recent books are
Relations: New & Selected Poems and Facing the Music:
Irish Poetry in teh Twentieth Century.
“Agnostic Smoke” appears in our Winter
2000 issue.
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