Rain 48
by Cróna Gallagher
The shape of the landscape spoke of her lips.
The way the ranges lay low in the rugged distance
all chapped and scaled from the constant squalls; the whittling ice.
She opened the crag of her mouth, and the tongue was a salt marshland
stocked with waders and stoats. They fished through the reeds and the bitter vetch.
They ventured into the dome of her corbelled palette to orate their foraging thoughts.
The dusk moves on, the dawn moves in and they move off, as light slices down through the gap
in her capped front teeth. She holds a wedge from the gap in those limestone teeth.
Keeps it as a tool with which to test the way the winds blow.
Her eyelashes come from the wandering hedgehog; strong rushes woven into hoods, thatched
visors to shield her hare quick eyes and to house the long stag-heart gaze. The hedgehog made
off to become a mole, was part mole already with the long brown nose, and glad to be rid of his
quiver of quills, as he dug down deeper away from the Queen. She took her nose from the beak of an eagle
recycled her mind from the dog fox, and a bearded jackdaw made up her chin.
She has the frantic fingers of a spider but the palms of her hands are badger big.
A garland of blackthorn and oak twists around her hair, beech clogs clad her feet
and between each toe grows the rowan and the scarlet holly.
The berries she gives to the fortunate rook.
Now the canine frosts are cast in cold iron,
and winter storms suck the sap out of prong tongued trees.
This is when the hare in her eyes will saddle the wind, will race the long shadows,
and chase mountain goats, chase mountain rams to be sacrificed for her own good.
She employs a gizzard to chew on their entrails, grates fog into sleet from the bark
of their gnarled horns, and then sounds out a summon to the wolf hounds waiting in the woods
as her eyes shine like demons and she moves across the peaks, swift as a swallow.
She roars her orders through the rain; a report comes baying back from the distance.
A sad and desolate call from the hill, from the throat of a scorched vessel
thousands of years old, and covered in stones.
She is bound to our time through the weight of the ages
and she watches from the wave of the mountain, in the coil of it
as the rusting wind plucks at the wire in the lyre of her larynx.
It suckles on her nostrils, fights the foxes in her ears,
and drives home an air, through that shining gap
between her teeth.
Cróna Gallagher’s poetry has been featured in Revival, The Chattahoochee Review, Magma, Popshot, The Moth and PB3. Her fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Crannόg and Drunken Boat. Her work was commended at iYeats 2013, and her piece “Ballypuca” was nominated for a Pushcart prize. She has received a Literary Bursary, and a Travel and Training award from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her collection of poetry is The Doves of the Forest Night (Lapwing P).