HANDED DOWN

Easter Sunday evening.

We pore over our given hands,

shake off the torpor of a feast.

 

Mock reluctant grandparents, razor-sharp

in snug armchairs, have been drawn in.

Back to the fireplace, on a stool

I’m folded, ready to wrestle

their wrinkled fingers: solo whist,

clash of one against three.

 

With his one-time bank clerk’s deft flick

my father riffles the pack, cuts, shuffles,

and deals four provinces their chance.

I decipher the semaphore

of reordered dispositions:

faces are fanned as a shield.

 

Preferring no-trump mayhem 

to canon of hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades, 

Dad’s favourite bid, misère,

defies us all to make him win.

As patterns emerge, others warm

to a prospect of abundance.

 

His own father is a slab of a man.

White hair trimmed weekly, serious

about gaining majorities and

taciturn as a croppy boy.

Has De Valera next to God,

says only “talk never played a hand”.

 

“There’s a nice little card for you”

replies my mother’s mother, easy

with the humour of dual loyalties:

brothers in Cork shipyards, husband

at Jutland, translating wireless

signals. Another volunteer.

 

Hush. Turned cards are on the table,

played like scenes from Irish history:

the rising and the risen.

 

viii.2009 [iv.2022]

Literary Orphans #12, 2014

HOLIDAY HOME

I. BREAKFAST WITH ALZHEIMER

Hello. Hello.
Swimming the synovia
between sleep and perception,
a voice articulates:

Hello. Hello.

I turn deaf ears to awareness.
Clamber back into dreamy silt-traps
where other endings are allowed.
Too late.

Beyond my curtain, long awake,
gulls with yelping laughter
jeer at contemplation.
Hello. Hello.

Unable to plan his rising,
an old man calls from the next room, stiff with confusion.
Hello. Hello.

It is a creeping death:
personality crumbles and faculties fail,
week by week by seven-day week.

Hello, he says. Hello.

 

* * *

II.

Away on a well beaten track
Dorset nears with appearance of gorse,
splashing the borders yellow.
Here is a folded soil.
Beneath its lynchets, a chalk spine
porous, soaks away our turmoil.

From paddled landings and whooping wingbeat
we nudge past gift shop fudge and crystal figurines,
hot on the trail of clotted cream, jam and scones.

Over downs to Melcombe Regis strand
where once town band, sardined in bathing machines,
honoured royal bellyflop - “God Save The King”!

Below the precinct’s mansard windows
baggy skateboarders displace shoppers,
with darkness gathering
to practice tic-tac manoeuvres.
Pigeons, at roost on stucco garlands,
rubberneck the umbrageous craft.

Grabbing, open armed, a moment’s solitude,
I flip through secondhand vinyls.
Higgledy-piggledy they recall
a gull’s wheel in my mind’s eye,
arcing after charity scraps
flung from the harbour wall.

 

* * *

 

III. A MOVEABLE FEAST

Over juice and cereals
with leaflets, family and friend
review the host of possibilities.

Sunbeams penetrate our narrow lanes,
warm the uncertainties
between Palm and Passion.

Strewn with gusted sand, the prom
in bow-fronted fashion
welcomes mismatched pilgrim feet.

A Maundy paddle chills
as mea culpa, hand on heartbeat,
I do trousers-rolled penance.

Children, grown beyond my preaching,
pursue their own balance
on newly purchased skates.

Across on the Pleasure Pier
fishermen choose their weights,
and casting lines, coax Bass to bite.

Parents stuck in dodgy deck chairs,
under a lonesome diamond kite,
watch over summer’s first castle.

Encased in gilt, the jubilee clock
chimes overdue renewal,
mystery beyond measure.

With fish & chips we end
like a lerret moored at leisure,
bobbing, faced both ways at once.

iv - vi. 2001

Poetry Salzburg Review #9, 2006

PERSPECTIVE

Sit with your back to the road
on the edge of a layered distance,
a bounded foreshortening.

In tones of cloudy quiet,
watch morning dogs walk their owners;
feel the timber play beasts anticipate
a shower of infants, and stiffen.

Observe the passage, west and east:
pigeon and train are moving planes,
framed in viaduct and beech.

Hear tennis players, white and black,
bounce and reach; sweaty joggers also
make their entries and panting exits.

See smokers amble, slowest,
most foreshortened.

v.2000

EARTH

Sledgehammered, my crowbar tears,

levers flints from soil newly wet.

I pile their cut faces

scores of stone skulls quarried,

when grubbing out privet.

By tools I’m hedged about:

a pickaxe prises, loosens,

for spade to cut and clear.

Two forks, saw and secateurs

complete my corps of weapons.

Embedded roots wrenched free,

I hear your weakening grip,

ready myself a last heave

on that stubborn tap, and guess

my ego’s backward trip.

ix.2000

I remember

I remember covering each other’s absence

from laboratory practicals;

myself away at union meetings,

while you’d gone to the movies.

A perfect working relationship –

when we were young together.

I remember your disbelief

when told I couldn’t ride a bike;

the insistence that I learn

on your boneshaker with its dubious brakes –

when we were young together.

I remember shopping trolleys:

how we moved house with belongings piled

high in a caravan of them;

and how you used to ride one around the supermarket,

in among the tinned tomatoes

and widest affordable selection of breakfast cereals

when we were young together.

I remember being out in the snow at night;

hurling snowballs, making angels, and tobogganing

on borrowed lab trays and a plastic toilet lid;

crashing into drifts and each other,

and staggering, sodden, home –

when we were young together.

I remember, I remember

when we were young together.

Seeing half a dozen films in a day –

everything from the sublime to the ridiculous –

then discussing our own scenarios into the early hours.

Taking the late night bus into town

in our anti-fashion threads, and dancing

to an exhausted immobility afterwards.

Plucking up the stomach to follow you

onto the fastest, scariest whirligig.

And though you’ve gone ahead

to where I cannot follow now,

you’re here still in my memories of

us always young together.

in memory of Phil Godfrey, 1957 - 1991

RIPE

Gift of Easter blossom:

your lips, pert and plush,

seeming parted,

take a second bite

at the marshy mesocarp -

dinner alfresco on the Champs de Mars.

We pick our approach

to drooping rest;

the Eiffel tower from Montparnasse

winks at the window.

Waking with yawns

to a mountain range of cherries,

piled like pyramids,

beneath the shutters -

a cerise dream,

doubled on a single stem.

v.2000