Filiocht Nua: New Poetry

Abstract

The Cancer Bureau The nurse paints on my puffed belly The Load line or the Plimsol mark. She says it will rise and fall through salt water And where tidal streams Connive to build their rudimentary dreams, She says my weight will be greater. So much for the spindles, pulleys, and shafts That conspire to show My maximum permitted loading For Winter North Atlantic, Indian Summer, And Tropical Fresh Water, For as I tell her over and over, I never plan to leave this world again. The Railway Guard Past the church, a brambled lane, the remains of dairy farms, legal notes hammered onto fence posts, and fields of assorted grasses burning clear to the iron track. Out of this dry clay near Gormanston, in the needle white of November, men still bring their horses down [End Page 37] to hug the foreshore as if what they fear in the encroaching tide is not the tide alone. Moon-worshippers used to winter here, and their bitumen chalets, in vapors of creosote, now lie chalk-pegged for the Geiger boys, so all our bruised affection bristles in cardoons and docks. From such marine enamel, sandy scores of the black and the white might tell how we recede in the scant world of the bled photogravure, but Clare smiles and whispers that here is as good as anywhere to mimic the salmon shoals who never betray what gossip might thrive in the olive orchards and seaweed barrios. I know that fifteen summers spent on my knees, combing through eel grass, sea holly, sea lavender, could never hope to appease, but when she walks to greet my grandfather—the railway guard— on his Marsh Road settee, she is whiter than all of these. [End Page 38] The Stone House: Dromod Harbor Boat piers are much alike. Stepping ashore at The Stone House, Doused in the inky stream of Acres Lake We walk a tarmacadam line Where curvature comes together As strands of carmine Climb through migrant sprays Of laburnum and maple. In a wait that slowly accumulates Until too long, hours refract, And like a tiptoeing through a glass lean-to We examine the stills of this romance— The trays of alpines dusted over, The hunter's shot leaving no report, The tennis court going under— Trying to fathom that flinty allure As somehow the wail Of the long-haul Dublin train Recalls a man who was falling, Crying out somewhere For his coffee-stained hill, Folding his wings as if all he desired Was a polished strip Amongst petrified pines, Where the stain of silence Would be heaven sent, And boat piers would great the innocent. [End Page 39] Quince For my new year resolution I'll plant quince in the boggy warren of the garden, or in pots, trailing somewhat but giving up their fat, like pears. I'll spend autumn sniffing the peachy down, on their soft baby heads, place them in a bowl for pomander then scrape what fragrance comes from the puckered leaves to rub on my nonexistent spleen. I may need a cure for dropsy, a balm for the asthmatic lung, something to place on the red that inflames my eyes, but, as forbidden fruit takes on the fulsome curve of a dwarf cello, I'll remain in the suit of the man who flits from roulade to madeleine, conversant with all faiths and believing in none. [End Page 40] Menzies' Field The first sun of the year clips the spongy red trunks of the redwoods, as I sniff the Pacific air that Menzies, ship surgeon on the Vancouver expedition, quaffed two hundred years ago. St. Patrick's Eve, give or take a decade, the ground like a trampoline, I am up to my neck in resin and my goiter throat stinks of gum, recording last year's triumphs like the painted cemeteries of Audubon. Even the smallest flight is here preserved, though the wing beat and the throat song are less revered. As I play your...