Driving on Old Roads

The coastline’s smile is sharp with blackened teeth,
seabird shelters, scarps, cutaways, broken reefs:
the bloody mouth of a boxer who can’t be dropped,
punch drunk with the brain’s purple pounding; stopped
glaciers, slipped slopes spilling, the effluxion of scree,
gone into the great gullet and the bite of the sea.
Breakwater, boulders slung with seaweed and white blowback.
Seals baking on blocks, beach bleached or black,
chipped and abraded, the scrimshaw coastline curves here,
doubles back. Ferries enter the salt-haze and disappear.

Whatever is in the mind or memory of the Ring of Kerry
it broods on its shoreline, sheer cliffs, the guillemot’s eyrie.
In my oldest recollections, my grandfather was a cliff of a man,
as distant as MacGillycuddy’s Reeks or Carrauntoohil Mountain.
Already, Parkinsons was working in him – soft turf, rockfall
and we had little to say, shaking hands, big in small.
A policeman, farm-owner, respected neighbour, witty, devout
but Parkinsons bent him forward and hollowed him out
and the mountain my father knew, snow line and plough line
was mostly switchback, tourist lookouts, closed by my time.

On Valentia Island, on a platform of stone that collared
one gravelled beach, are frozen tracks of tetrapods, scrawled
in mud 400 million years ago, dimples, drag-marks and scrapes.
By the time I got to them, down a rough-cut trail, their shapes
were worn down. Bad weather and the sea’s chew,
collapsing one whole section, shifting the beach askew.
Similar to the photo of its first discovery but not the same,
a steep path through sheep fields, though I was glad I came,
I could see what it would have been like, the gooseflesh
of prints. I wish I could have seen it when it was fresh.

Damen O’Brien is a multi-award-winning Australian poet. His prizes include The Moth Poetry Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and second prize in the National Poetry Competition. Damen’s poems can be found in New Ohio Review, Aesthetica and Arc Poetry Magazine.