Alone

To turn, on eyes opening,

find again that blank space beside you;

come downstairs,

witness to the still-birth of another day;

a receptacle of words, restless

to be heard but no ear to hear them;

to move, room to room,

through the obdurate indifference of objects;

remembering warmth in memories

that leave you to its shivering absence.

The Day Passing

In the hospital,

Mary Byrne has not spoken

for almost three hours.

All afternoon she has been following

the progress of three rectangles of sunlight

over the floor and onto the walls of the ward;

her eyes flooded with swallowed past,

blank future,

pointless present.

February sunshine silvers bare branches.

She, sitting at her kitchen table,

turns her hands upward to run her eyes

down the insides of her arms,

to see how the water will drain

when the clouds burst.

She lights a cigarette,

then sits in the snake-pit

listening to the slitherings around her,

till deafened, she flails at them

so they become smoke.

February; heavy drops knock on her window

and she, conscious of  the thinness of  glass,

of the thousand mile spate that's around her,

crosses to the hob to make tea,

to forget  branches. 

Hughie

Hughie thinks of sex without faces;

he often thinks this way

because there never was a welcoming face,

so he never had sex,

and this July he'll be 46.

Hughie lives alone and is settled in his ways;

people think him peculiar,

never ask him to join them in the pub

or wherever.

He is growing more peculiar, they say.

Hughie has an office job;

colleagues bid him good morning at coffee-break

but sit at a different table.

He eats his lunch in the Arms bar,

and always sits facing  the wall.

Loneliness

At One End Of A Bench.

 

At one end of a bench

an old man wearing Winter clothes

regards the fountains and Summer

through melt-water irises.

 

He needs my ear to be a conch

 

so that he can call to the past

 

down these auditory canals.

And when he calls, his wife and son

 

will resurrect, return, reverse

 

like filings into a family.

 

It is mid-morning in Stephen's Green;

the usual sounds: clacking fowl

 

and fountain symphonies, and beyond

the thrash of traffic and voices. 

In that moment: two strangers on a bench

 

 

are travelling backwards to Mayo;

elsewhere a beggar has recreated himself

 

in a bank window and somewhere,  in a kitchen,

 

a woman is conversing though the voice

 

that answers has not been heard for years.