Embedded Files
Maupertius and Reindeer
‘If we opened the door of a warm room, the
external air instantly converted all the vapour
in it to snow;’
Maupertuis
My name is Pierre and
I am sick of these pétarades
(my guts bloated
with turnip fibre)
still; don’t have the little sea illness
the others have
they slip in vomit
while I read charts and fill note-books.
I feel my father in sharp air:
René, stand back or I will befoul you Sir
the old man
is here and not here
he sails
looks for English ships
to loot
on his corsair.
I am here to do the same
in a way, to an Englishman.
To stand on his shoulders
with a new map of the world.
That is why I am first here
in ‘our land’ as the locals call it.
Months since I left Dunkirk,
pleasures of Paris gone behind.
I am a star
in the world of men
in the world
of women.
My eyes soften
and soften
at details swimming out
of the cloudy mass.
Fog hinders
our observations.
At one in the morning
Mr. Camus
and I left our company
to reconnoitre the mountains, northward.
Abroad like this
the very air is tearing
our breath in pieces
we have
fish and berries.
Bears haunt the nothingness.
The borders have gone
- my mind wanders.
Errors occur
( keep in mind errors )
a sudden mass
gathers itself and to our relief
becomes
a huge breath of reindeer vapour
above snow.
They quietly chew resin
soft bodies of night
munch
fragments of the moon.
A herd of roots
sit under roots,
massive legs curled up.
I wonder
under my hat of reindeer
at the space of horned animals.
Instinctive,
ready to go
in a breeze.
It is in the trees,
it is in the white landscape,
it is snow falling,
it doesn’t think on inhalation.
My nose is not like a Reindeer’s
labyrinthine soft cave
where air changes
from hurtfully cold to warmth.
Do my eyes change as Reindeer eyes
change -
become swollen,
more sensitive
liquid squeezing out,
collagen fibres,
the mirror
a bouncing blue pool
glittering from fragments out of the dark?
One of the reindeer
turns its head.
I consider if the eye, in its orbit, is spherical.
The Reindeer is ghostly
and is here
such a large look
touches zones,
is electric.
I stamp my feet
yes, I do ridiculous things like that.
Keeps me sane.
The endless triangular paths
we map out in a dragonfly’s wing.
Over fifty miles.
All the measuring
of sticks and measuring
in the snow.
The bloody Cognac
passes round.
Fires of a thousand colours
light up
ripple
tacked on curtains of the sky.
I feel whipped
into understanding.
In the moon an impact crater
fills my heart with blessedness.
The lemon
must bow out
for the clementine.
Those witty men and their shape of the Earth.
My body at last understands
with fatigue.
I watch as
great coats of reindeer
shovel with hooves
till the lichen
reaches light.
Or the Christmas mushroom,
when reindeer
pass out
flying
to a constellation,
their nose
in another space.
They run
upended, flat to the ground
wide hooves twitch
on air.
I determine
the shape of the Earth.
The oblateness
of the Earth
only that
and still you do not remember me?
In the dark
one degree meridian
between this town’s spire
and Pello
home of the Fairies
and continual fogs.
On the river,
great green headed flies
fetch blood,
Haltios rise
the guardian spirits.
Everything
in this landscape
is sacred
animistic -
the reindeer reindeer
the oval drums,
their filaments,
edges, people,
borders.
The great ancestor
becomes a compass
on the springing surface
of reindeer hide.
A rap of notes,
reindeer hooves
echo from the forest.
The Pulkas -
a boat shape
transporting coffins or people
transfer
pulled by reindeer
the generator of action.
They haul out from the underworld
to the rock lip.
They leap
into another world.
Slower, they swim,
snorting.
A line of lit candlesticks
smooth and moving
beyond the current.
Mark Lawlor’s poems and short stories appear in Blackbox Manifold, Stand, Cyphers, the moth, The Crank, Magma, Skylight 47, Chasing Shadows Anthology, Cavan Anthology, The Irish Press, The Sunday Tribune, Anglo Celt, North Magazine, The Cork Literary Review, Windows, Lemon Soap and Icarus (TCD), The Drumlin, Force 10, and The Irish Times. He won a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2021, and was one of the prize winners in the 2023 International Competition for Nature Writing run by the moth and judged by Kathleen Jamie, published in The Irish Times.
Copyright © 2025 by Mark Lawlor, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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