The answer in an envelope
It lies on the table, lips pursed like a religious aunt
in possession of the truth
and the certainty that only a believer
can deal with it. A believer like her.
I am not a believer, not equipped
for the awareness that, in another space,
a disjointed elbow distant,
such frail material can set my cells chattering.
It can be under your fingers
and a thousand kilometres away —
an answer that was an itch
before it became a question.
My daughter is in her room, half-hiding
secrets she carves out of plasma,
sparks of dopamine reflected
on the screen of her retina.
She looks up as I pass, acknowledges
my parental checking with a quick smile
before returning to her episode.
At least she still yawns like a child,
rubs her nose with the back of her hand.
Nobody has convinced her you don’t do that, yet.
The answer is a tendon of love binding
a muscle to its bone, the suspicion,
that anything that can be torn,
will be. And that tearing is deliberate —
the rupture of particular fibres.
He hides the answer with some other business:
pensions untranslated, previous official things
he wouldn’t know where to find, hopes
maybe this will seem less important
after time, that it might somehow lose
itself in paper.
Painted by numbers
Your raincoat is a shade of wing-tips,
the underlip of swell,
contour of clouds compressed,
certain stones;
your face, the patient, arthritic,
absent expectation
of storm peeling off the Atlantic,
familiar ache
of island weather, the colour
of resigned hostility —
a shatter of mews rendered
against a shatter of brine
against a shatter of cut glass sky
— grey raw waves of rain and gull;
what you came back for,
painted in a strain of white,
after what you came back
for had gone.
Craven Man
You come from the west,
where a good part of the world ends,
and the rest just drowns itself in winter.
Surveying us with your voice of heath and shale
Oh great clods of humanity,
stroking your thatched moustache,
wiping wisdom off your chin,
deducing absence with great hands,
you palpitate first your granite pockets,
then a paper autopsy of poetry notes to find, what?
A chatter of chairs, dulled spines
contorted by wrought learning,
some still busy with their Tippex
poxing generations of boredom.
Where you come from, soil sprouts heather
and calls it surviving …
… all these south Dublin boys have to worry
about is which bank will put them
out to golf.
Have you seen it?
Grey knit shrugs over darker grey shirts.
Have you seen my watch? Watch?
Other terms for stupidity include . . .
The chronic incredulity on our faces,
our resting, adolescent mistrust.
Your watch?
The watch you don’t have,
because time is a word that takes care of itself.
You learned that picking stones out of a field,
counting them to make a day.
You learned that as you brackened into age,
the moss of your jacket binding life to itself,
sandstone of your hair resisting retirement.
And the day you aren’t here, there will be
another drizzle of attention on the playing fields,
more words put out to grass.
Somebody, with a bit of luck, or a compass
might carve a memory into his desk.
Meanwhile, diminishing a ruler,
you unseam one boy
from nave to chops, fix
his bemusement on your battlements.
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