|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
She climbs out of her shift and pays ten francs for a lilo to the beach-boss who has rushed his torso and his squeaky voice across to share a joke.
She adjusts the ivory teeth about her neck, ties her hair back, lets her breasts subside and slides slowly down until her legs are gentled firmly to a fearless V.
Muscularities are at her feet like moths for volleyball but get no closer than retrieving ricochets, are left to play for real.
The man who picks her up at five must be her husband, and the mini-belle their daughter. She’s serene enough. I don’t watch
all of this each time, of course— sometimes she’s lying there when I arrive. It’s possible that somewhere else you’ve heard about my ritual from her.
Previously published in The Frogmore Papers, No. 49 (Spring 1997) ISSN: 0956 0106 and What Moves Moves, (Shoestring Press, 2004) ISBN: 1 904886 05 1
It’s a long way to Hollyhead by night, then to arrive as close to America as Ireland gets, to see the very picture I’d imagined in the train’s dark window: a whitewashed cottage with its whitewashed garden wall. There was a gate you had to drag off the ground, and a forge I’d stand outside at one end of a path that petered out to grass— and nettles I’d fall in though I’d been forever warned.
If the cottage came while I was travelling backwards all those years ago through Wales, I couldn’t see the peat fields the men set off for every morning with the horse and cart. Once they did say yes, laughing, only to put me down in the lane. They wouldn’t be keeping a constant eye on me, for fear I’d disappear.
Previously published in The Rialto, No. 52 Winter 2002/3 ISSN: 0268 5981
Community means Europe trawling Norse-named shores with Gaelic caught in the Gaeltacht if at all. Smerwick gulls, like cats-eyes, stand in shallow water and house-ends are sails across the bay, above the one-field farms that can’t afford farmers living the life of Reilly as they do.
Armada Spanish hid in these hills and changed their names. Had they stayed at home till Franco made Madrid the centre of everything, they’d have had to buy back the fish transported there and eat it looking out on the water they’d fished it from. They’d send their haul to Dublin now.
Like your man Joe who’d always complain, arriving late to set up his stall in Maine Street, that the Upper you go the Mainer they get. But they’ve gone, to England or the U.S.A., leaving a lobster pot to lie on its side in the sand like a sweepstake tumbler.
A row-boat’s chained in rust to a concrete disc, beside a spreader that made whirling tracks around it in the early hours, an empty plaything with a cone. If there’s little left to fertilise anyway here, at least the lichens’ green is green - and it’s colour,
fresh as the breeze you huddle from, you notice most, and the gulls, and how far back where you come from goes.
Midnight under a fish-skin sky, the cut-out dip and rise of blackened trees dropped in for distance. Warnings come
with thick black borders like mass cards for the dead. An untipped cigarette. Silly to suppose there’s life beyond those jokes of yours.
This kind of peace. Monk’s straight-fingered evergreen Round Midnight will play for drinks tomorrow. “The original is always best.”
Here, the night-light spent, mild air is improvising a disturbing calm. Find the poem you’ve been looking for, plundered second-hand.
Death, it decides, becomes a problem of style. How are we living still and vexed by what we’ve achieved?
Two late bottles of London Pride help create a reputation I can smile about. I take one chilled, the other warm, then come inside.
Behind the central evergreen that you want rid of, a brick shelter is your wine vault and a cold retreat, its fat cigars for gardening
and driving home from taxing days. Why should you want it seen?
|
|
©
of
all poems featured on this site remains with the
poet |
