The undertaker's assistant

The undertaker's assistant puts her finger
to the tip of a tilted coffin
to guide the inexperienced pallbearers.

She stands at the ready in black livery,
perky buttocks in clinging trousers,
jacket pushed out by cocky breasts.

But what makes me stare is that black ribbon
looped around her saucy pigtail.

Published, 2002, in ROPES (Review of Postgraduate Studies), Issue 10, NUI Galway. (ROPES does not have its own website).

Bloodline

We seldom speak of you in this house
where you stabled your plough horses.
You are that silence between sounds we rarely note.
Are these hedges compositions from your hands?
Did you grunt in these ditches,
drag out slippery weeds
from dark, sucking mud?

We changed what you thought might last
past your time of horses and scythes
- they crumbled, there is neither bone nor rust left -
we sliced off one river bank,
weeds dance in your ditches;
a motorway storms through your High Field
like a bully roaring in a schoolyard.

There are still apple trees, chestnuts, a few primroses.
We carry you in our blood into the fog.

Published, 2000, in ROPES (Review of Postgraduate Studies), Issue 8, NUI Galway. (ROPES does not have its own website).

Another dreamer

The grocer sits and smokes behind his counter
- pock-marked lino top with tobacco burns -
explains to any listening idler
how to get rich, run a country, rear children.
As he speaks he flicks
tiny tobacco flakes off his lips.
Customers seldom come in:
there is little to want on his hungry shelves.
He addresses the few with certainty.
His yellowed fingers weave the air.
His navy suit, thin as tissue paper,
dances on his shoulders.
He confounds his listeners
with big-money cant
conned from the business pages
which turn yellow
while the light dulls
to the cold of three decades
and the dark moves in
thick as the walls of Fort Knox
with all America's gold
locked up behind them.

Published, 2001, in ROPES (Review of Postgraduate Studies), Issue 9, NUI Galway. (ROPES does not have its own website).

A night out

Wife and husband wordless,
tongue-tied in the Corrib Lounge.
She looks away, her face is closed.
He scowls into the dregs, plods to the bar.
She regards the bottom of her glass;
her lip twitches. He sidles back
with a thin smile and another pint.
Nothing for her: she will do the driving tonight.

Published, 2001, in ROPES (Review of Postgraduate Studies), Issue 9, NUI Galway. (ROPES does not have its own website).

Unfinished work

The rat trembles on the lawn like a leaf.
Our cats have snapped its back. They look bored.

I pray for them to finish it
and drag it to a neighbour's garden.

Instead they piss off and leave the job to me.

Published, 2000, in ROPES (Review of Postgraduate Studies), Issue 8, NUI Galway. (ROPES does not have its own website).