David Nash 5 Poems

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Nov 17

Why You Should Really Think About Rewilding

We are standing
in what used to be
our forest.
Some spailpín rot or
spore of fungus
had ridden here on
a swallow's wing, or stowed
itself in the fine suede deckshoes of
exotic seamen,
had somehow anyway
come upon a needle, got
sucked up and drawn
into the heartwood, and the heartwood
had played vector to the rot,
which spurted out in turn
hemophilically along
the tree internet like
fast-forward sap, and we know
from there how things
go south:
our wide-eyed jungle
died.
I understand all that.
What I don't accept is
why we couldn't
just have let it pass away
like everything else does:
slouching and faintly
and bewildered and
milky and drifting and slow-motion sap-slow,
not
bluntly, like this stump-scape
no man's land.

If we'd left the place
as was,
it might even have outlived us.
Anyhow the land
isn't good for anything else, so
look at us standing here now,
already ankle-deep in thickets
keen as kitten claws
and shrub reclaiming, dogged
as truth.
This is an overture, it
establishes the main
themes that get recalled
later on
in the thick of
the story.
Groundwork is a memory
posting itself forward in time,
so you needn't lift a finger –
it is its own device.
What I'm saying is
take a chance on it.
The seed is reckless.

The Plastic Bag Full of Plastic Bags under the Sink

You know you're Irish if you have once of these,
though you'll also find you're Armenian
or Hispanic or Jewish or Czech, because thrift
is universal. What, then, is Irish? Is it Dansk

biscuit tins full of sewing detritus? Not ours
either? Stew is also out – it isn't really an
innovation to boil all the food that you have left,
or at least not one that one can claim. To ask

an old lad on the road directions, shoot the breeze
and end up drinking with him? #onlyinireland?
The past is better everywhere, and there's no craft
in protesting so much difference. But there is risk.

"The Plastic Bag...' was first published in Copihue Review.

Synecdoche

The man from O'Mahoney's
Tree Services Ltd. says that the only
difference between himself and an arborist
is softer hands and clout.
He recommends felling, to no one's surprise.

For all we know he's right, filling
his boots with Mom's brown bread, though
I find his further grounds
overkill: comes a storm, says he,
this Cúil Aodha Cassandra,

comes a storm and it's through
your windshield you'll find it.
Or through your eye, God forbid.
And the masterstroke: Or through some young thing.
That settles it for Mom.

June that same year and the grasshoppers
are all saying heat. I emerge
from the dead-still lake in a film
of scum and water striders to the far-off wasping
of a chainsaw, and march home towards it.

I am in time for the fall,
the tree genuflecting to its own expiry
and the leading-lady swoon of the leaves on the ground
like all its life's breath had arrived at once.
We stand over what's left, a halo

of sawdust around what looks, from above,
like a map of a city – old town
in the centre; high-rise splinters
to the side where it was tipped; monochrome,
but only if you squint and from this far up.

Zoom out further, and in a time
before cities there was real fatalism
and risk was an afterthought, quotidian.
If something killed you, it killed you –
there would be other lives.

'Synecdoche' was first published in Cork Words.

Nettle

I'd like to bring my grandfather back to life just to get him stoned,
the good kind, the thirst and laughter kind. He had, I think, kind laughter.
My plan is this: I'd tell him the weed was nettle seeds I'd honed
to be smokeable, we'd use his pipe. I hope twon't kill me, he'd say, and me just after
dying. But I am his. People of his don't do him harm, we're reliable as clothing.
I'd watch him reinhabit his trout-skin, retake stock of his own mouth,
suck his false tooth like he used, laugh about this. I need to know some things.
Did being called Gaga put in or put out on him? Is it true that in this part of the south

they used to make known their love by whipping the object of it with a nettle?
True, Gaga would tell me, the grasping of the stinger was the pain that proved it.
Here he'd open his big bready hands and stroke out the lines where the leaves should settle.
Gentleness won't work. It should be in your hand before it knows you've moved it.
He'd fix his bloodshot eyes on Granny's masscard, curling on the shelf.
He'd tell me all of this. I wouldn't have to find out for myself.

Nettle was first published in Local Wonders, by Dedalus Press

Imaginary Farmer

You don't know shit, says my imaginary farmer
when we have debates about reducing the national herd.
Literally, like. You don't know the first thing
about it. Not the gleaming cakes the cows leave
in their wake, not the ripe road-apples of the coach horse,
not the rat-slick, not the castings of the worms, earth's
afterbirth, not the stuff people are happy as pigs in,
not bunny bullets, not spraint, not frass, not scat, not fewmets.
Not squat. You wouldn't know the dropping from the bird that drops it.
(He is something of a poet himself, of course,
and uses lists as shock-and-awe.)
I do though, I protest. Couldn't I tell you your future
from the pattern of the cracks in week-old lorum,
which, by the way, is bespoke Nash family vocab for cow-pats?
And don't I know my own? And am I not an alchemist myself,
like every other beast? Do you think you're above or apart from it?
And we go on like this, knowing things at each other
while gravity draws every step closer in to land
and all our eyes roll heavenwards.

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David Nash was born in County Cork and lives between Ireland and Chile. He completed his MA in Writing in Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010, where he won the Pat Kavanagh award for Best Portfolio, the first poet to do so. Since then he has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including The Stinging Fly, Modern Queer Poets, The White Review, Propel, and the Dedalus anthology Local Wonders. His art texts have appeared in numerous exhibitions and art books, most recently for Wolfgang Tillmans at IMMA. His first children's book, Bajo Mis Pies, was released in Spanish in 2020, as did two translations of books on the social and cultural history of Chile. He also writes columns for Harpers Bazaar Korea and Elle Korea, and other essays have appeared in The Irish Times. His first pamphlet, The Islands of Chile (14 Poems), came out in 2022 with 14poems. No Man's Land (Dedalus) is his first full-length collection.

No Man's Land, the highly anticipated debut collection of poems by David Nash, is available from https://www.dedaluspress.com/product/no-mans-land/