Poems by Paul Casey

extract from the cento-sonnet sequence From Which it is Torn 


Love
for T.S.Eliot and after fourteen poets


I loved her in the cradle of the stars
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought
Lovemaking intoxicates me a bit more than it should
It’s being in love people love, the constant excitement
In her house love’s kept in its black plush box
Love is a white-hot black hole in outer space
I haven’t a hope in hell against succubus
A bindweed of love, untamed, that sings to the twirled bud


Storm-lovers fast against the sharpest turn of wind
Eyebright, so we can see the colours of our love
Long after hot love-bites that watermark skin
Love, the moon, passed between us
My moon-eyed, dark-eyed, fire-eyed lover
Has love dispelled your terror of the dark




Sisyphus retires in Cork city        


The hills in this city keep the head at a certain tilt
with life carved oblique in all its convex facets, each
jewelled day a surprise of soft mysteries that curve
through one another as feet step into the maze. A 
long walk presses a latent film into 3d memory
wind resigns itself to surrounding only small scenes

At its highest point the city's crown waits to be
worn for a moment by any curious pilgrim,
happily lost tourist. Locals here are drunk born.
Walk north along parabolas, hyperbolas from east 
to west and down to the wizened river to wade
reclaimed marshes, roam level west to east

and south through vales, dales, glens, castles
hidden lakes where curved suburbia skies widen
where shadows disappear past heights that hide
the harbour, hold the sea. Swing north again and
enter contours as if for the first time, wind your 
way along the cambers of pathways and bridges

a climb of small revelations flows up to the looming 
heights, angle into rondures of ascent, into helixes
of road, half-moons, horseshoes and ogeed flanks
of class and style. The heights and dips lift, plunge
and douse and steep your wonders and troubles into
oxygens of infinite character. At the gibbous lip of a 

well-travelled meniscus, the expected cradles the un-
expected, reveals a network of curlicued possibilities 
for an instant, boggles with choices before pace and
momentum give way to instinct. There's no room for
disappointment. Just the endless journey of options
all yielding to priorities of discovery around and down

up and almost over, the more we know each other
this city and I, the ever closer what is possible. An
aquiline descent points back to the source of balance,
a fountainhead of eunoia. I am luniform. I am Sisyphus
on his final ascent on the day he is freed, only dust left
to blow from the apex and worn grooves of his shoulders

along with the knavish fragments of hubris residue,
the forgiveness of hades and redemption everlasting.

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Paul Casey’s début collection is home more or less (Salmon Poetry, 2012). His second, Virtual Tides, appeared from Salmon in early 2016. He has published poems in five of his six spoken languages, along with articles, in journals and anthologies in Ireland, the US, China, Australia, South Africa, Romania and Bosnia-Herzegovina. A chapbook of his longer poems, It’s Not all Bad, was published by The Heaventree Press in 2009. He completed a poetry-film in 2010 based on Ian Duhig’s poem, The Lammas Hireling. He is poet in residence each May for a group of elderly homes, during the Bealtaine festival. Casey edits the annual Unfinished Book of Poetry, featuring verse written by transition year students from Cork city schools and teaches multimedia and creative writing courses at the Cork College of Commerce. He is the founder/director of Ó Bhéal, at www.obheal.ie.