Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

Abstract

Filíocht Nua: New Poetry Mary Noonan in the house I am back in the house, with my father reading the same paragraph of newsprint, over and over, as the light fades and the letters break up and slide over the page and he tries to corral them, dogged in his conviction that if he keeps herding them, they will stay there, on the page, in the house where a trail of tissue-marbles leads to the bathroom, with its tiny squares of paper, folded over and over, then laid out in neat rows along the window-ledge. Is it too late for me to write my prayer on them, open the window and release the wind horses to the air? Paper is sacred in this house where every shred becomes a miniature envelope for elfin letters posted and collected by an origami master who spends hours swaying on his wasted hip as day morphs into night and he sweeps the drift of snow from the black tiles, or picks each white fleck from the ribs of his cords. I wish I’d said goodbye to the man whose step I waited to hear, bounding up the stairs, whose cool hand I loved to feel on my forehead, whose “How’s the patient today?” made my heart jump. I wish I’d said goodbye, before the ancient shape-shifter came to build his nests of lint, his hillocks of gristle. [End Page 53] my mother, aged fourteen Their shoulders are hunched, as if they are cold, or frightened, and they are wearing shy, half-smiles, heads cocked slightly to one side, quizzical, wary. Their skirts are of boiled wool and worsted, their cardigans darned, too short in the sleeves. Their flat brogues are laced with mud. You are the only one wearing a jacket, and you sit bolt upright, eyes glinting. Is that defiance on your face, or am I asking too much of this worn photo? The sole of your left shoe, which you are trying to tuck behind your right leg, is gaping. But Dorothy is dancing in your head, clicking the heels of her ruby red slippers to magic herself back to Kansas. There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home. Where will you go? To Mayes Drapery in Fermoy, or to William Hill Bookmakers, Picadilly Circus? To rear five children on a new Corporation housing estate in Cork City? Your feet have chilblains. How could you have known that your children or your children’s children would fly to New York to buy shoes fashioned by men with a sense of humour and names like Manolo, Louboutin, Jimmy Choo? And that their confections would have names too—Very Privé, Toutenkaboucle— and plunging necklines, revealing toe cleavage? Or that they would be cantilevered, engineered to tip hips and bottom up and out, for optimum bootiliciousness? What do you think of that, [End Page 54] my little mother, looking, with serious intent, toward the nun who is snapping you on your last day of schooling? How do you like our foot candy? flux Not only her stone face, laid back staring in the ferns, But everything the scoop of the valley contains begins to move —Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “Pygmalion’s Image” What is it, the one thing that moves in this field where no-one goes? Not only her stone face, but all of her marble body becomes milk-white flesh a girl she sprints to the stream, slips in and floats on the melt-waters tumbling from the rocks above Her ears fill with sounds: wriggling of a zesty adder in the weeds scuttling of a rabbit, its bob- tail halfway back into its burrow up-draught of wind in the feathers of a jackdaw as it springs from a branch [End Page 55] Her eyes are awash with the green fruitiness of grass, a cloud of whirring mayflies, a fox plunging under a hedge with a goose by the throat soft white feathers float on the air The veiled voices of blades of grass blowing westward awaken her blood, whispering There will be secrets vanishing acts You will love everything...