Mirrorful

Eyes are gazing on boys who explode from springboards to shell the sea, and joyfully splinter its mirrorful of sunset.

He is indeed, no Fra Angelico holding up a little mirrorful of Heaven, with heart and mind so filled to overflowing with the Beatific Vision, as to leave no room for understanding of earthly misery and sin.

OUR CHEERFUL MIRRORFUL

He felt his mind fading, the keys of the piano red, the glass pillars holding up the world cracking one by one, each with a separate sound like a toothache. Above the splitting he still tried to explain to Joseph, to explain to McKay. He tried to weep. And they didn’t hear him, but ground on. Thousands of them. Mirrorsful of them . . . The keys of the piano were hard, and slightly warm, and stretched away white again like satin ribbon.

Yet I concede pride’s pool, that mirrorful, / Aflare with the armadas of a day: / Science like elate Longfellow’s Ship of State, / Praises about the prow, factory-loud / Midships scattering light, a peacock wake; […]

Mountain ponies / Driving before dawn, higher than the kindling streams where gradients were too steep for grass, I glimpsed them, life-like, a mirrorful silvered on the dark, gouged like a frieze along edges of rock.

Distress works on the face of that woman who would look for herself in me as if in a mirrorful of smiling meadows, and at the one you will see as oddly alien: my own ghost condemned to my form of this world.

The rare breaks from the mirrorfuls of poets work best: for example, the droll humour of “Buchanan’s Fancy”, where body-searches in Belfast are seen as sought-after sexual titillation.