Death in Iceland

Literary Review, Summer, 1997 by Christine Clear

   There is a soft flower-bed beneath my feet.
   It is your look, your face when you talk,
   that space where my foot will step--
   am careful of it. Below the clay the ivy is entwined.
   Every moment, every word that was uttered,
   speeded up, or left hanging, is gathered in that thick rope.

   They call it fighting, the whistling stone falling
   in a well way below the ground. Fighting.
   By removing the hills from the voice
   I open the door day after day and can meet you.

   It was only terrible until I realised
   fighting is polishing the spirit in the dark.
   The sadness was too black to shine,
   but outside the window now there is a steely light
   which is chilling the carpet's dust.

   It keeps the future at bay, that light does,
   better than a veil strung before a set of burning coals,
   whose shadows were too tall and deep for silence,
   and so it was the grey venom you chose, to stay alive.

   Your mouth rounded on the venom as if it were sweet,
   it kept your lips loose and wet, and your eyes moved quickly because
   of it.
   It helped the words break from your tongue and when the storming
   came
   there was the precision of a plant turning from the dark.

   Today's colour is grey; infinite and cold.
   It was snapped from the black circling your feet.
   You pulled and pulled at it until you felt the fog fall,
   and we saw then by the veins of your wrist
   it was the nearest you could get to white.

Christine Clear, born in Dublin in 1965, is working on a collection of poems entitled "Mr Snake I Need You," and is completing her first novel, "The Life and Death of Margaret Gibson."3