Under the Bridge

I sat under the bridge, our old den;

flung out a net to catch memories,

and sat watching the water’s  steely

mail grind past. It was cold, 


and I would not have chosen to sit there 

at this time of year;  life is miserly

to those who want a moment; I needed to stop,

 to look back, to feel my belonging.

Oh yes, I pulled in some cold fish;

 cold for their distance, estrangement; 

and cold too  for recognizing, as the years flow,

 the emptied out treasure chests of childhood.

The Boy Who Watched For Apparitions

  Goodnight to the twin moons

  stretched along the railway tracks

  outside Roscommon.

  My night-time window halved

  with those trains rushing across the glass,

  strips of film filled with their own lives:

  adventurers and bon-vivants,

  whose strings of lights recreated as they passed

  the grassy slope, the elder bushes,

  the buffer with the hole in the side;

  strangers oblivious to such little worlds

  and to the boy who watched for apparitions

  from his bedroom window.

  And in a moment they were gone,

  leaving the darkness darker and the boy listening,

  trying to gauge where the sounds 

  finally disappeared into the wind.

 

  What lay beyond that window-world ?

 

  The station to the right,

  the white gates to the left,

  and then..........

 

  Now I remember those film strips

  sailing through that pitch emptiness; 

  sometimes they were only ruffed impressions

  when the window was full of pouring rain.

  I remember how my imagination filled like a can

  when all that was left was the headlight's beam

 over the trees of Bully's Acre.

  And there is often disappointment in these poems;

  the disappointment of that place beyond

  where the rhythms of trains were reclaimed by the wind.

Patsy's Life

Patsy

Patsy thinks of sex, but without faces;

he often thinks this way

because there never was a welcoming face,

so he's never had sex,

and this July he'll be 46.

Patsy lives alone, and is settled in his ways;

people think him strange,

never ask him to join them in the pub

or wherever;

‘he’s getting more peculiar’, they say.

Patsy has an office job;

colleagues bid him good morning at coffee-break

but sit at another table.

He eats his lunch in the Arms bar,

and always sits facing a wall.

Christmas Flowers

All those words:

hey, welcome, happy Christmas,

we’ve missed you,  wonderful to have you home,

happy new year, I love you.

And the following, inevitable

take care of yourself, safe journey, be safe,

goodbye, we’ll miss you, ring.

Christmas flowers:

the bright blooms with their thorns,

colouring the season, bloom in your heart,

bloom beyond the decorations, into Spring,

and still when shafts of April light are gathering heat;

when  the bright space of Summer is widening around you.

On Seeing Cnoc Mordán from the Clare Coast

I have a notion of beauty that is a wild place;

a grey desolate lake beneath a craggy ridge,

a windswept landscape of stunted thorns,

strewn boulders and scattered outcrops,

furze blooming out of season, dun-coloured reeds,

bronzed bracken broken double by the Atlantic gales.

But it is not the place, not really, it is the girl that lived beside that lake,

in the streaming Connemara gales that swept  her hair,

gave the colour to her face; sallowed her skin

so her eyes shone sharp as needles; gave her the same grace

as the reeds by the water,  slender and graceful. That’s how I saw her;

and now I see the ridge across Galway Bay forty, closer to fifty years later.

Unmerciful time; the place is unchanged but I am old,

and she is old, and the dreams that were young and beautiful

are now like the bracken broken double by the Autumn gales.

But it is not the girl, not really, it is the notions in our heads still hanging 

though November has come, and the sunlight on Loch Con Aortha,

long past summer, full of the cold clarity that comes with Winter.   

Statement

My demons know no boundaries;

I am a propeller

blinded by my own agitation.

When I come to

I’ll be devastated,

and stamp out fires that never burned.

Blue-veined old hands :

I never saw them coming

till they were spread bleak

as the limbs of Winter trees

across vacant heavens.

When I said I loved you

I whacked at the wall

with a stick of oar weed

picked off the strand.

Cantankerous old fool :

never saw him coming

till words I spat out

fell like lightning turned

to twigs of rotten wood.

The baby in the tree

It's surprising where ideas come from. There  was a white carrier bag snagged high in a tree on Leinster Road.

         The baby in the tree

The baby in the tree

is screaming.

High above the pathway

near the black tips

of the sycamore branches

he is gaping,

white membraned luminous.

How did he get there?

He blew there in the wind;

it took him

like a flag from his cot

till he was stretched

across the boughs

like the wings of a bat.

And who sees him?

I do;

all his hopeless writhing,

too high for the passerby.

And his screams:

too high,

too high for the passerby.

When you pass

written with Karen McManus in mind.

When you pass,

cups miss mouths,

ladders slip,

buckets crash down,

cars veer,

cyclists swerve,

drunkards sober up,

poles and policemen collide,

business men miss kerbs,

schoolboys drool.

Me? I’m just your wing mirror,

enjoying the devastation

behind you.

Dum te dum te dum

In glorious Technicolor, breathtaking Cinemascope, magnificent

dum te dum te dum te dum stereophonic surround sound, Michael

lying on corrugated roof watching for Germans or Indians

crawling on their bellies through the tall grass of Glynn’s garden.

Eyes, pillbox slits. Sharp blades of grass quivering in June breeze;

or infiltrating dogs, enemies. Sounds, rustlings in the heat haze,

above the undergrowth, flicker in his eyes; sweeps the sweat

from his forehead beneath a blazing noon sun; endlessly patience,

tripwire-finger on trigger. It was the time of get that woman back

into the wagon, but Michael skipped last night’s soppy love scene

and is now the last one, the only one, still alive to defend O’Dea’s.

Goddess of Winter, Cailleach

I am weave,

flows bare bones of the land,

roots blood my stealth;

streams mountain hair,

hillsides’ ruminations,

meadow fantasies;

bleaches sunlight,

sugars earth,

rips the seas’ tides;

calls clockwork from branches,

buries bones in soil, drags days behind,

stirs the year.

Poem beside your hospital bed

Your face that I loved
has changed so completely
that I already know
Our time has gone.

And, as dying like a sandstorm
rearranges your features,
I am useless,
a cripple of words.

But if the winds
 in your head will carry
the smallest part
of what I'm trying to say, father

let it be
that my proud years
are tatters here;
I love you.

Wheel

In this wheel

I am spokes, smile and scowl.

Tonight, careering around the town,

I see all the pub doors closing

and take it personally;

don’t want to go in, don’t want to stay out.

Next week I'll tumble down these steps again;

people always make room

but then, just as I've nearly passed,

they kick me.

My smile and scowl are identical;

they think I'm a contraption.

Visiting the Corsetmaker

 It was ireland in the sixties. Corset conversation veered very close to immodesty. Michael O'Hehir was the voice of Sunday afternoons in Summer, and a spin in the car seemed like a good idea, but children get bored quickly.

 VISITING THE CORSETMAKER

Miss Gately, you know, the corsetmaker; her cottage 

thatched and whitewashed beneath sycamores ragged with 

crows and their bickering. A Sunday afternoon, my mother 

walking to the red door and it opened and closed and 

nothing else stirring for ages but ourselves in the back of the 

white consul with the red roof at the end of the avenue, just 

outside the gate; stone walls and lichen patches wallpapering 

our afternoon. Father dropping off in the driver’s seat 

while Micheal O'Hehir commentated on matches, one after 

another, without ever taking a breath in all that pipe smoke; matches collecting in the ash-tray all burnt to tiny black bird 

bones and the condensation all used up with words and 

faces dribbling pathetically into shapeless bad temper. Over 

and over: will she ever come out, can’t we go now, why do 

we always have to come, move your legs; till eventually she 

would reappear, a slap in the doorway, motor jauntily, 

red-headed, back to the car like it’s been five minutes or 

something, and Dad’s awake, reversing from the gate, back 

into the remains of a Sunday afternoon.

And I never knew what went on in there; never saw who 

opened the door, never saw a package, never heard anything 

about it. My father didn’t know either. I remember she 

took my sister with her when my sister was in secondary 

school. I wouldn’t have wanted to join them anyway, it was obviously a woman’s house.

‘Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

‘What are we?’ I ruminate;

flat stone skipping over water.

‘What are we?’ opposite wall

in blind alley.

‘What are we?’ armchair

drowsy in fireglow.

‘What are we?’ a tooth

in kindred company.

‘What are we?’ pin fixed

 in a pin-cushion.