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).

With Niamh in Harcourt Street Children's Hospital

The intravenous drip machine doggedly
hums through the night,
breaks into fits of frantic ticks
as if it wants to fight its way out of the room.
I have my comforts: book, newspaper, flask of tea
and most importantly: a naggin in my briefcase.
A child wails on the wards, always;
shoes clack on tiles;
you, inscrutably
suck on your soother;
I eye the briefcase.

Published, 2000, in Snakeskin, September issue

Influenza, 1918

The dying woman roars again
and the stench of lavender and disinfectant
attacks our revolted senses.
Her awful roaring tears through the bedrooms
and echoes through the great floors below
and down into the dark cellar
where their father sketched a dragon
across the wall for the children at Halloween.
Her roars hammer at the children's heads
and terror stains the deepest well of their minds.
The influenza will fling her howling
she believes into everlasting hellfire
and though she is a guiltless woman
she roars in her delirium
for God to pardon her and cleanse her soul.
Her pallid husband goes in and out of the room.
The women shush the children away
for fear they will tumble with her into the pit.
The softness in her voice is gone;
its hard horror dries up their mouths.
The cattle bellow in the yard outside
and the doctor's Model-T Ford
importantly rat-a-tats up the avenue.
The gravel patiently awaits
the wheels of the inevitable hearse.
The women drink tea but terror drives taste away.
They reek of disinfectant and lavender.
They long for fresh air, trees and flowers,
a man yoking a horse to go to the fields.
The woman roars again: forgive me!
Her children press their hands over their ears
but now it is too late for that:
her terror has begun to ring
and echo down the passage to their graves.

Published, 2000, in Poetry Ireland, Spring issue

Stronger than death

Death introduced himself to the country boy
in a sweet smelling, rank fruit market,
in a great loud barn by the quays in Dublin
where he stood all agog beside his aunt
listening to the uproar he never heard before
of forklift trucks, clanging and commotion,
men bellowing, iron screeching on iron.
His aunt seemed quite at home, bargained
for oranges, apples and pears for the shop
until a man came up, whispered to her
of sorrow, a phone call and death.
All stopped, they raced to her van,
hurtled back to Caragh and the country
through frenzied traffic that terrified him.
His aunt seemed to him to be possessed
by whatever dreadful thing she had been told
and said nothing. He did not know what to say.

She left him at her mother-in-law's house
amid whispers, silences, clasping of hands;
his grandmother gave him tea and cake
and told him his aunt's father was dead.
He recalled a tall, thin man with glasses
smoking one evening on his grandmother's sofa;
now he saw what was meant by death:
bad news flying up the Dublin road,
strangers whispering in the market place,
shocked and frenzied women hurrying home.

He longed for Ladytown's fields and his mother:
since death came screeching into his life,
he felt as if he had been gone forever.
A key clicked in the door. His mother stood there.
He will never forget his delight
that one who was stronger than death had come
to save him from this knowledge and this place.

Published, 2000, in Cyphers No. 48

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).

Taking the plunge

The boy in the photo hangs above the Atlantic
like a drop of rain from the edge of a leaf,
paused in mid-air between diving board and water
on tiptoe, arms spread,
like a dancer, balanced between this moment and the next.
He seems to delay, motionless,
where delay is forbidden,
where what's permitted is a plunge from past to future,
the now a rush of sky, waves and shouts of friends.
A camera clicks, he does not hear.
One day he will look at the picture and declare:
That's odd, I don't remember a thing.
Perhaps that dot in mid fall
was not me at all.

Published, 2000, in canwehaveourballback.com, issue 4 (Website no longer exists in original form).

How it begins

Her breath is rank with booze,
she fumbles a carnation
into his hand, murmurs
I've always fancied you.
A flurry of too-sweet scent
catches in his throat;
she whirls and titters
at someone else's joke.

Published, 2000, in Snakeskin, September issue

The female geriatric ward

The girls are beached in geriatric beds,
life got fed up and broke their legs and fled,
abandoned them to grim faced nurses' aides
in realms of commodes and walking frames.

Poor Sleeping Beauties, their fun is at an end,
no prince is on his way to rescue them.
Princes have more to think about than this,
than waking up old ravers with a kiss.

Published, 2000, in Books Ireland, September issue

Treasure

A tide washed her to his solitary island,
left her intact on its wet stones.
Morning uncovered her in first daylight.
He contemplated her from all sides, appraised.
Her eyes were slightly open. He held his breath,
edged icy eyelids back: eyes brown, black-shadowed,
earth-warm amber turned to cold;
red hair - she must have been a whip-tongued scold in life.
She dressed for her final act in a denim jacket,
lumberjack shirt, warm amber to match the eyes,
navy jeans plastered to thighs by sea water;
her skin so cold. Quiet: nothing stirred: wave, wind or bird.

He spent hours with her in night's privacy,
her cold beauty a wonder to his trembling hands,
her cold flanks smooth like sea-worn stones,
her mounds, her hollows, burning marvels.
In morning's indifferent newness he carried her back;
water sidled in, lifted her up, took her out.
He dried her clothes - sour smell of steam from his range -
folded and smoothed them, shoved them under his bed.
That night he drank, remembered mounds, hollows,
fingered her clothes, fumbled inside her jeans,
thought of her appearing out of water, naked,
dripping salt, warm, to perch on his lap.
He packed her clothes into his smouldering range,
cremated them one by one - a night of stoking, poking -
felt in hot ashes for zips, buttons,
stumbled in unforgiving day to his solitary beach
to fling them into suffocating water,
pressed fists against his island's wet stones
to cool a violent pain from her burning zips,
scalding buttons, gold and silver of her estate.

Published, 2000, in Snakeskin, February issue.

A note to Patrick Morrin, deceased

Your grandchild Elizabeth stood on the altar
- you died long before she was born or the church built -
and read verses you wrote forty years ago
about death and rebirth, winter and spring
in front of your son Laurence's coffin,
he dead at seventy four, she stunned with grief
beautiful too as she read your lines
to the congregation. A child
cried, Mammy I want to go home.

Laurence's sons lifted his coffin heavily
onto their shoulders, conveyed him through incense
out of the church, down the hill, under dark skies,
hedges dripping silently, tarmac glistening,
up the wet gravel road to Caragh graveyard.

He lies near his brothers Edward, Arthur, John,
a short stroll from the old graveyard
where you await resurrection
by Robinsons' field.

Published, 2000, in Snakeskin, February issue