OUTSIDE A COTTAGE They allow themselves to be strangers. Here is somewhere else for them; They hunt for images to take back To perfectly ordered cupboards In Germany or the States Proud to have captured Something authentic of the place. When the bus drops them The cameras come out To snap the cottage ruin Rimmed against the black desert Of bog and overgrown mountains With the bones out through them. They shoot the ruin not sensing How the image is a frontier Imprinted with the presence Of the ones who laboured here, The stones warm with breath >From the time a tourist was a wonder. These will never know how it was To live here and know nowhere else To wake up inside this house once And come out at dawn to discover Gifts left by the door in the night A shivering lake between flowering granite And this line of new, blue mountains. A DEAD LOSS Don't ask me to walk here These mountains come too near Something desperate in the mind. In this light, blue and high, They pretend to be horizons Raising the affections of the eye. But in their secret cloister They hold every voice captive Offering from all that loss no echo. -- John O'DONOHUE,author of a collection of poetry, "Echoes of Memory," and best-selling publications, "Anam Cara," "Eternal Echoes," lives in a quiet glen in Connemara.