dreaming in the ksar es souk motel
TRANSCRIPT
Dreaming in the Ksar es Souk MotelAuthor(s): Eiléan Ní ChuilleanáinSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 63-65Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477104 .
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Eil?an Ni Chuillean?in
Dreaming in the Ksar es Souk Motel
For Sean O'Faol?in
I
The hard sand
Moulded like the sea
Sleeps out dawn
Planing east
In shallow scoops of light
Folding over caves and graves
She sails within glass walls
As in a ship, her mouth
Dry with air that hisses
In iron corridors
Her food smells of engines Her share of water glows in a jug
A soft hum between
Her and the bird's cry Outside she sees dogs In dry riverbeds
Silent faces dark as the bark of trees
Pausing watch her drink
. . . There were roads
For wide-eyed fish muscling along She could see palms waving mile by mile.
Here she never tasted salt, but backward
63
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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW
And forward in its short cage while she slept The square swimming-pool pounded.
II
Shift-click of night wave
Knight's move of current
Switching tides in a small square bay To land below grey pointed houses looming In clear air of daybreak
And a remote bell scares the flatfoot gulls
Walking up the ferry road
While from a chimney crest a blackbird looks
Severely down.
The bell rings seaward
Then reverberates uphill Where the pale road curves away Between dry white convent walls.
Standing on the wet flagstones you can see
Only the sidling road.
But follow the sound,
There are steps, lanes
High walls, darkness of sandstone
Valerian springing from cracks
Gutters and the ridges water makes in earth.
Out of sight the rivers persist
They riddle the city, they curve and collect
Making straight roads crooked, they flush
In ruined mills
And murdered distilleries.
Ill
It has to creep like water, it cannot jump or spread like fire
It needs to labour past mountains to be lost
To see the drops fall in the still.
Like snow like sleep it grows
64
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DREAMING OF THE KSAR ES SOUK MOTEL
Like a dream it accumulates like a dream flows
Underground and rises to be the same
It feels the drumming of the hare and it fears what's yet to come
Suffering the storm and hearing the slates crash in the yard.
IV
In summer dawn a mirror shines
Clear in the surprising light; The shadows all reversed point towards the sea.
65
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