Delivering the News 9780773558274

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
METAPHOR
PART ONE Seeing Red
CONTROLLED BURN
DELIVERING THE NEWS
STEERS
TWIST
LAND OF YOUTH
1 BANK SWALLOWS
2 PICNIC ROCK
3 LEVIATHAN
4 ARTERY
THE GOAL
ORNITHOLOGY
1 MOURNING DOVES
2 TRAJECTORY
3 SHAVING OUT-OF-DOORS
4 MORRÍGAN
5 CORBIES
THE OTHER FOOT
THREE COWS
COLD SHOULDER
FELINE
1 MOUSETRAP
2 SMOKE
3 INDETERMINACY
SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMERS
PERFECT FIT
TALL TALES
MEMORY
HOW IT ENDS
LETTING GO
OUTSIDE THE WAKE
THAW
WEATHERING
1 HINDENBURG OVER WEST CAPE
2 TWO HORSES
3 CAPE ROAD
4 BLAST
5 ALCHEMY
HERMIT CRABS
SEEING RED
ENVOI
SAILING FROM AN ISLAND
PART TWO The Wide World
THE RISING
SLEIGHT OF HAND
ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ: TWO PHOTOGRAPHS
CORTONA
AU CHAT NOIR (1883)
BLUE NOTE CATS
1 Bouncing with bud
2 Moment’s notice
UP AT MINTON’S
SERGE CHALOFF
STARS FELL ON ALABAMA
MYTHOLOGY
1 THEY ALL LAUGHED
2 STRAIGHTEN UP AND FLY RIGHT
3 NIGHT AND DAY
4 (LET’S TAKE IT) NICE AND EASY
5 WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE?
AT McNELLO’S
TIME WAS, WHEN I SPORTED
AFTER Ó BRUADAIR
1 PREROGATIVE
2 UNTITLED
MAYNOOTH, 1822
An Slatóir
Dánta Grádha
1 ULYSSES
2 WHITE SQUARE
AFTER PETRARCH
RED AND GREEN / ROUGE ET VERT
THE FALL
LA TZIGANE
PARTNERS
SMOKE SIGNALS
ELLIPSIS
BEDROOM SUITE
1 SUNDAY MORNING
2 THE ODYSSEY
3 PICASSO
4 MOONLIGHT IN VERMONT
5 DOUBLING ON BRASS
6 MAKEOVER
7 MAGRITTE
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Citation preview

d e l i v e r i n g t h e n e ws

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t h e h ugh m ac len n an po etry s eries Editors: Allan Hepburn and Carolyn Smart Waterglass Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Chess Pieces David Solway Giving My Body to Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast S.P. Zitner The Thin Smoke of the Heart Tim Bowling What Really Matters Thomas O’Grady A Dream of Sulphur Aurian Haller Credo Carmine Starnino Her Festival Clothes Mavis Jones The Afterlife of Trees Brian Bartlett Before We Had Words S.P. Zitner Bamboo Church Ricardo Sternberg Franklin’s Passage David Solway The Ishtar Gate Diana Brebner Hurt Thyself Andrew Steinmetz The Silver Palace Restaurant Mark Abley Wet Apples, White Blood Naomi Guttman Palilalia Jeffery Donaldson Mosaic Orpheus Peter Dale Scott Cast from Bells Suzanne Hancock Blindfold John Mikhail Asfour Particles Michael Penny A Lovely Gutting Robin Durnford The Little Yellow House Heather Simeney MacLeod Wavelengths of Your Song Eleonore Schönmaier But for Now Gordon Johnston Some Dance Ricardo Sternberg Outside, Inside Michael Penny

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The Winter Count Dilys Leman Tablature Bruce Whiteman Trio Sarah Tolmie hook nancy viva davis halifax Where We Live John Reibetanz The Unlit Path Behind the House Margo Wheaton Small Fires Kelly Norah Drukker Knots Edward Carson The Rules of the Kingdom Julie Paul Dust Blown Side of the Journey Eleonore Schönmaier slow war Benjamin Hertwig The Art of Dying Sarah Tolmie Short Histories of Light Aidan Chafe On High Neil Surkan Translating Air Kath MacLean The Night Chorus Harold Hoefle Look Here Look Away Look Again Edward Carson Delivering the News Thomas O’Grady

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Delivering the News Thomas O’Grady

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  Thomas O’Grady 2019 ISBN 978-0-7735-5635-5 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-5827-4 (eP DF ) ISBN 978-0-7735-5828-1 (eP UB) Legal deposit second quarter 2019 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Delivering the news / Thomas O’Grady. Names: O’Grady, Thomas, 1956– author. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series. Description: Series statement: The Hugh MacLennan poetry series | Poems. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190047895 | Canadiana (eb o o k ) 20190047917 | I S BN 9780773556355 (softcover) | ISBN 9780773558274 (eP DF ) | I S BN 9780773558281 (eP U B ) Classification: L CC P S 8579.G735 D45 2019 | DDC C 811/.6—dc23 This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 9.5/13 New Baskerville.

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for Leah & Brendan Inniu chuir mé do dhánta, aoileach, scian, scealláin: an pháirc mo phár bán, an rámhainn mo pheann.

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Contents

Metaphor 3

Pa rt O n e   Se e i ng R e d Controlled Burn  7 Delivering the News  9 Steers 10 Twist 11 Land of Youth  12 1  Bank Swallows  12 2  Picnic Rock  13 3 Leviathan  14 4 Artery  15 The Goal  16 Ornithology 17 1  Mourning Doves  17 2 Trajectory  18 3  Shaving Out-of-Doors  19 4 Morrígan  20 5 Corbies  21 The Other Foot  22 Three Cows  23 Cold Shoulder  24 Feline 25 1 Mousetrap  25 2 Smoke  26 3 Indeterminacy  27 Synchronized Swimmers  28 ix

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Perfect Fit  29 Tall Tales  30 Memory 31 How It Ends  32 Letting Go  33 Outside the Wake  34 Thaw 35 Weathering 36 1  Hindenburg Over West Cape  36 2  Two Horses  37 3  Cape Road  38 4 Blast  39 5 Alchemy  40 Hermit Crabs  41 Seeing Red  42 Envoi 43 Sailing from An Island  44

Pa rt T wo   T h e Wi de Wor l d The Rising  47 Sleight of Hand  48 André Kertész: Two Photographs  49 Cortona 50 Au Chat Noir (1883)  51 Blue Note Cats  52 1  Bouncing with Bud  52 2  Moment’s Notice 53 Up at Minton’s  54 Serge Chaloff  55 Stars Fell on Alabama  57 Mythology 58 1  They All Laughed  58 2  Straighten Up and Fly Right  59 x

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3  Night and Day  60 4  (Let’s Take It) Nice and Easy  61 5  What Is This Thing Called Love?  62 At McNello’s  63 Time Was, When I Sported  64 After Ó Bruadair  65 1 Prerogative 65 2 Untitled 66 Maynooth, 1822  67 An Slatóir  68 Dánta Grádha  69 1 Ulysses 69 2 White Square 70 After Petrarch  71 Red and Green / Rouge et Vert  72 The Fall  73 La Tzigane  74 Partners 75 Smoke Signals  76 Ellipsis 77 Bedroom Suite  78 1  Sunday Morning  78 2  The Odyssey  79 3 Picasso  80 4  Moonlight in Vermont  81 5  Doubling on Brass  82 6 Makeover  83 7 Magritte  84 Notes 85 Acknowledgments 87

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d e l i v e r i n g t h e n e ws

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M E TAP H O R

Stars gasp and die, dawn’s soft black cloth the hangman’s tightcinched hood. • At last, before first light, a way with words he understood.

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PART one

Seeing Red

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CO N TROL L E D B U R N

The world had spun, the days grown longer, brighter, endless winter’s dusk-grey snowpack melted into muddy piles of salt and sand and gravelly silt, glinting grit. The windows open wide, the globe a-tilt on the deep-set sill, we slouched at our high school desks and watched a rumble of red and ringing gold pull up and firemen descend from the shining pumper like a swarm of ragged blackbirds bent on scouring a close-cropped autumn field. But this was spring and that field no spreading meadow of fresh-mown hay but an unkempt urban plot of tussocky hummocks matted into mangy tufts, the scraggly fur of an old dog’s corpse, ripe with decay and rot until brought near boiling by a week of the lengthening sun’s low simmer. And so to stave off random sparks – the flick of some stray match or a truant’s tossed butt – the captain touched a torch to the tangled mass and set that clumpy lot ablaze … though not to let it burn until burnt out of its own accord.

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Does nature daydream summer? Minds bored numb by the dusty white noise squeak of chalk, the teacher, heedless, yammering on and on, we sat, the whole room, rapt by the spectacle below of a shimmering brigade fanned out across that bleak half-acre: flames licking like crested waves at knee-high boots, they waded to their ankles armed not with coiling hoses but with brooms – stunted Curling Club castoffs, bristles bound tight as glowing sheaves of Saskatchewan wheat – to beat that conflagration down to smoldering earth. We had learned already what happens next: a night or two of drenching rain and, by the book, a scorched wasteland sprouts green shoots of life. The turning world will spawn its own rebirth.

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D E L I VE R I N G T H E N E W S

On wild March days that cotton canvas sack held rain like a tent and hung so low it thumped a sodden beat like a leaden weapon sheathed against my thigh. Schoolboy short, I cinched the strap up high in a knuckled knot (my collarbone still sports a phantom bruise) and shouldered on. From door to door I bore the soggy news, street by street – Churchill Avenue, Spring Park Road … • War, Pestilence, Famine, Death. Was I deaf to the headline roar of my unwieldy load? Weight of the world. Art of the backhand toss. The guileless messenger shot at and missed. On Friday nights I tallied my receipts and somehow ended, always, at a loss.

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S TE E RS

Today I walked the shore road past a field of steers. Swaggering block-shouldered anvil-browed brutes, taut muscle and gristle, sheer beef to the heels … they gave me the eye. Do heavy-breathing beasts see red en masse? I returned the stare through sagging barbed-wire strands until in phantom fear my knees went weak and my heart skipped decades back to that hard lesson learned in high school hallways – the bruising jostle and jam of elbow jabs and hip checks, slew-foot trip-ups, locker slams … all life’s indignities rehearsed before the morning bell’s first call. Mere oxen in the sun? Meekly, I inhaled salt air. Even a gelded bull has horns.

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TWI S T

The spitshine on my wine-dark wingtip brogues a sunburst splash, a burnished chestnut sheen, I blink back fifty autumns to a croaking high noon summons from a rickety porch, a tarnished nickel clutched in a knuckly fist: how that scaresome crone, her gummy drooling grin a crooked picket fence of licorice nibs, stopped me short in my trudging schoolboy tracks. How I turned heel and ran, both ways, to fill her cornerstore request. How my palm reeked for days from that scissored snip, a cud cut from a seeping braid of tar, wax paper-wrapped: a gob, molasses-soft, of cured tobacco … a pruned “fig” of Hickey & Nicholson twist.

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L AN D O F Y O U T H from curve of shore to bend of bay 1   B A NK S WALLO W S Once I lived in trembling fear that a bird’s bright beak would pluck out my eyes – the gravel pit in Cardigan, my cousins’ warning words the darting shadow of flicker and flit. Just one peck, I imagined – a heron’s quick ice-pick stab in a pool still rushes to mind – then behind a scarlet gush of pitch-thick blood, an empty socket, a lifetime blind. So egging each other on, we hurled rocks against the crumbling bank, becoming brave as Ithacans below those frightening flocks, each nest-infested tunnel a Cyclops’ cave. What punishment could ever fit that crime? Once, too, cliff-dwelling swallows swooped this beach. Now, besieged by the stone-filled fists of time, they – their spectacle – have soared beyond our reach.

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2   P I C NIC RO CK An old album, a thumb-scuffed photograph, black and white, circa 1964: centred, hair tied back by a windblown scarf, my mother in slacks and blouse. “The South Shore.” Behind her, pinned down by stones, a blanket unfolded across a table-flat, blocksquare boulder; and centred there, a basket holding the Sunday supper. “Picnic Rock.” The trusty Kodak, its accordion case … My father, trouser cuffs rolled kneecap high – just picture this – halfway up the cliff’s face to snap that shot with such a focused eye. How the shutter’s blink stops the lapping tongue of tide and time, the bite of sea on land. Can a poem’s lie keep my parents young? Words erode into brine-washed grains of sand.

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3   L E V I A T HAN A half hour later rising, or an eyelash less watchful, and I might have speculated forever on what brute force could drag or dash that ton-weight of cold-cast corrugated steel – a thirty-foot length of corroded culvert – against our cliff’s unsullied base: What creature’s churning gullet had unloaded, undigested, that rusty carapace? Instead, I stood defiantly nose-to-nose with a local farmer (we stopped just a breath or two short of trading cudgelling blows), not quite slight David to his Goliath. More like Jonah in the wake of his rough ride in the belly of the beast. In the trail the tractor left – its race against high tide – I traced the Leviathan’s thrashing tail.

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4   A R T E RY Not artesian (from the province of Artois in northern France), but arterial: a cleft chipped by nature into the jutting jaw of the cliff’s ruddy face – a cut as deft and subtle as a surgical incision (the scalpel’s aim true as a bull’s-eye dart), a vein tapped with such pinpoint precision, straight to the water-table’s pulsing heart. How the day stood still when we sought to quell thirst’s flame on drought-hot afternoons, quaffing from a mother-of-pearl lined quahog shell teeth-shivering draughts from that silver spring. We fancied once the trickle from that rustred bluff Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth. Now, the atrophy of years an ash-like dust, our fingertips divine the bone-dry truth.

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THE G O AL

The lower the cost, the higher the seat … Wisdom dispensed by some mountaintop sage? More like wit that “gallery gods” repeat – mere common sense – as we plod stage by stage to the balcony’s dizzying nosebleed peak, our legs paying twice the ticketed price for a breathtaking goal only diehards seek: the next-to-last row. But dead center ice. Then – the wonders of daughters, the marvels of hockey, the magic of rarefied air! How the worn wool jersey of time unravels as step by steep step we skip up the stair. How they become me in their puckish glow, and I my father forty years ago.

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O RN I TH O L O G Y

1   M OUR N IN G D O VES For days, every-which-way I go … mourning doves. Billing and cooing on telephone lines. Filling trees like a muted cacophony of crows. This morning one wooing pair flew overhead, their lithe wings scything the bright air into strips of sound – a flywheel wanting oil. They make me want to lace on skates again, for the first time in years: to scrape that stultifying sheath of rust from dull, distempered blades and – scintillating thought! – the love of my life on my arm once more, to slice streams of sky-white ribbon from a sequin-rich sheet of ice.

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2   T R A J E C T O RY Projecting its trajectory, picturing the ball’s bright flight – a lightning streak, an electric strike across blue sky toward the flag-staffed neon flash of green – I flex, unflex (wrists loose, hands tight), and think, improbably, “pipe-cleaner straight.” In a fairway pond, an egret waits – a rapt wire, a shock of white.

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3   S H A V IN G O U T-O F -D O O RS I would shave out-of-doors, my cheeks and jowls scraped raw as rust on an unstropped blade dipped quick as frost in a bowl of barrelled rain; I would risk that much to learn the name of the sleep-bedevilling bird whose strident pitch repeats those trebling strains that woke me once, far away: the tritone squeal of a clothesline wheel – my mother out greeting the day.

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4   M OR R Í GAN after Louis Le Brocquy’s illustrations for The Táin In time of war, the Morrígan appears, her ravenous rush a calligraphic stroke, a slick black blur brushed thick across the page, an inkspot smeared to a blotted clot. • Death’s dark draw: how I watched, transfixed, six raucous crows, their blood-dipped beaks bright nibs, rip part from pulsing part a frog, a tight-closed fist of flesh, a throbbing heart.

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5   C OR B IES Once more, grey light summons to the fore that harsh conceit: Scott’s “twa corbies making a mane.” Who, benighted by these short, dark days of March, benumbed by sheets of rain and sleet, blankets of snow, would not concede? For weeks, a stark, mirror-imaging pair of raven-huge blots, Rorschach-black, have held forth in that towering oak a block away as if holding sway over lords betrayed by hawks, by hounds, by ladies fair: every mortal inch that they survey.

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THE O THE R F O O T

This morning, dressing in the pre-dawn light (or dark … that window when night’s curtain parts and day stumbles in), I wondered can one slight misstep undo a life – is that how it starts? Could a wrinkled sleeve in a fumbling grasp or an unpressed cuff foretell the way we die? Or those damned darned socks? An unfastened clasp? A twisted belt? A badly knotted tie? On hands and knees on the cold closet floor, I sifted footwear by touch to no avail. Does history repeat? Our family lore preserves from long ago a well-told tale of an early Mass and a mismatched shoe – one plain-Jane brown paired with one navy blue.

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THRE E C O W S

The morning my brother laid a rueful hand on that curvaceous haunch – the sloped fender of his rumble-seated Dodge (cash on demand, finis) – my mother saw in that tender touch, his sad adieu to an antique coupe, her father’s kindly thump (his heavy heart) on their cow’s wide rump, drooping dugs dried up, as she swayed behind the tanner’s tumbrel cart. So it happens, time’s hard stroke dealt and felt. My turn today to slap a broad backside, a no-longer-limber hip. Our Springer’s pelt a lumbering Holstein heifer’s paint-patch hide, she looked, a newly weaned pup, a half-pint calf. We dubbed her, a dog’s life ago, La vache.

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CO L D S HOU L D E R

Nights when my wife complains of “the cold shoulder,” shrugging and tugging for, she says, her fair share of the covers, hanging on for dear life to the precipitous edge of the bed – her half halved again – I ask have I told her of the time I walked three miles in a threadbare coat … thirty below and the wind like a knife, my ears almost cut from my hatless head. Of how I then thawed out each frostbitten part – mittenless fingers, the tip of my nose – in the plush-deep warmth of a feline side. Might this melt even a blanketless heart? How now another cat, grown chill as the snows, stakes in old age a claim on the great divide.

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FELINE

1   M OUSETRAP Folk Museum, Toomyvara, Co. Tipperary Build a better mousetrap, a wise man said, and the world will beat a path to your door. A bitter pill for that creature we found dead last week, a fetal form on the closet floor, batted there, we guessed (the rattle and bang of the night before explained), by a grey flurry of unsheathed claw and naked fang, a lap cat turned tiger at end of day. But spill no tears for such a brute demise. Imagine instead that quaint contraption in Toomyvara, the crudest of machines: a baited box, bottom-hinged for – surprise! – a scaffold drop to a water-filled tin … Would death seem sweeter by any other means? 25

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2   S M OK E The unspeakable shock – not theirs but mine – of watching, helplessly, a hapless flock of unfledged goslings wade, a straggling line, straight into rush hour’s low-flying gridlock from the reedy reaches of Gulliver’s Creek; then, like puffballs pulverized underfoot, vaporize to powdery spores, a streak on dry pavement, a downy cloud of brown soot. Could even the most hardhearted stoic remain unruffled by a scene like that? Today, helpless with grief, I prayed for lyric release as life’s last wisp curled from my grey cat. Let this swell of words be my final stroke: a verse-blackened page lending weight to smoke.

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3   I NDE T E RMIN ACY The typical feature in these cases is that the indeterminacy is transferred from the atomic to the crude macroscopic level, which then can be decided by direct observation. – Erwin Schrödinger, “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics” (1935)

Like a cookie tin, she said, and I thought of fresh-baked shortbread squares … flaky, waferthin layers of sweet dough stacked in a squat canister bottom-lined with wax paper. Of fingers prying off an air-tight lid … the tang of pure uncertainty just before that first sugary assurance – a candid whiff of what choice treat lies neatly in store. Hardly of Schrödinger’s tart paradox (improbable parable of deferred pleasure) of a cat captive in an infernal box: “The living and the dead in equal measure.” Her wisdom folly, my ignorance bliss … that vet’s assistant left me much to learn. Such a quantum leap into the abyss. Such a simile for an ash-filled urn.

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S YN CHRO N I Z E D S W I M M E R S

Choreography. Precise as minnows darting side by side through shallows, shadows: random starts and stops, furtive flitting, lockstep twists and turns. Then svelte backs arched in tandem, tails curled high like vernal fiddlehead ferns.

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P E RF E CT F I T

Folding each shirt twice, prolonging my leaving, I spoke of last night’s dream of a dying cat. Thyroid. Leukemia. Wasting away. Pathetic. A grey bag of bones, I sighed. She listened, nodding … knowing, then lost in her housecoat hugged me goodbye. How we try on grief for size, one sleeve at a time. No hope she’ll survive the winter, I almost cried.

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TAL L TALE S

This doctor, that nurse … small talk of the ward. The weather, naturally: “unseasonably cold.” Politics … scandals and scoundrels: none ignored. The next-door neighbours, their house still unsold. “So tell me,” I started, but should have known that railroad agent’s daughter, country cute, would sidetrack my question with one of her own: “Did you drive out via the station route?” Then down that line she rattled in her bed, ravelling knotty threads in her father’s yarn of engine bellies scoured – “full steam ahead” – by four-foot dwarfs in the locomotive barn. Far-fetched? I laughed till I cried, clutching her hand. “Grand,” she came clean at last. “I’m doing grand …”

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M E M O RY

Once the crankcase bearings seized up, the pedals skipped, the rear cog slipped, the gear teeth lost their grinding grip, the chain hung limp, loose links of rust.

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HO W I T E ND S

Around and around the pond the boatman rows, back to the bow, stroke after steady dripping stroke. His arms grown heavy, one oar slips from its shaky lock … and then the other. • Leaden-legged, reversing course at dusk, the ploughman hangs a lantern from a pole above his horse’s head. One false step … and that ankle-twisting dance of body tumbling softly into blade-wrought clay. 32

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L E TTI N G G O

Hearing being the final sense to fail, we huddled together bedside, her breath growing short, and taking turns told one tale after another – laughter defying death. That dark weight about to fall, we plundered the past but kept it light by holding court on all those times we gaffed, slipped-up, blundered – affable give-and-take, our whole lives fair sport. Odd, though, the letting go of this faux pas: my stumbling drop of a cumbersome box – a leaden fridge laid low by gravity’s law. What spared me – Bumbler! Clod! – an oaf’s hard knocks? • “Steady,” somebody sniffed – the stiff upper lip. Lifting her coffin, we strained to keep a grip.

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O U TS I D E T H E W A K E

We shuffle foot to foot, scuffing our common ground – the weather … hockey … horses … beer. The evening shadows lengthen, deepen. Someone sighs. The streetlight blinks to life. Soon the talk will turn to why we’re here.

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THAW

April chill: his voice on my cellphone cellophane thin, cracking like ice.

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WE ATHE R I N G

1   H I NDE NB U RG O VER W ES T CAPE after a photograph in the Public Archives of p e i He squints, mired behind an anvil-shouldered mare. Sodden air, a clay-cold mass like ash-filled snow, wraps flush around the leaden sledge, a mud-bound bouldered barge. Below, ­beyond where bog-soft headland sedge drops plumb bob like a stone, a steel-toned dredge of sea, a shelf of molten slate, delves deep into itself. Above, against a sullen bone-grey sky, a plate of unwashed delft, a bloated shape – a sudden windblown cloud, a shadow dark as fate, a thumbprint on a brow grown pale – floats like a whale or an ark.

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2   T WO HO RS ES Once, on a morning just like this – mid-April, the clouds giving way like heavy doors to the first strong thrust of spring, a radiant eruption of sun over foot upon foot of fresh-fallen snow – I saw two horses bolt from a barn like foals as if they knew that winter had at long last run its final lap: as if – if they could – they would kick up star-like sparks, or burst out in song.

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3   C A P E R O AD Night nuzzles the corn. For hours, all ears; at first light, every sense reborn.

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4 BLAST It hit so close, that lightning bolt I dodged last summer, its fiery flash and jag-toothed crash a muzzleloader’s loud-mouthed shout. I thought I had been shot. But not shot through and through, struck to the core, like that old windbreak birch, a marker for our measured plot of land. Before it went, it stood, withstood, for years, beset by blast, a canker, or a cancer, aimed at trees … insidious disease. I dodged that too, the doctor said, his tight-lipped talk a jolt from the blue. “A near miss,” and yet, like voltage heaven-sent, it cleared the air and cleared the view. Let thunder roar. Stunned sunlight pours on our weed-wild field, floods gently sloped meadows, drains down to the whispering shore.

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5 ALCHEMY Just our luck. Morning unloads rain in buckets, leaden grey. We watch the sky and wait. We muck about and pace and place the day on hold. By noon we write it off and sigh. Hours pass. We scoff at forecasts painted blue. O ye of little faith! A bold crow barks a brazen note of hope behind the barns. The clouds begin to yield and lift, pale rays leak through. Then evening sun erupts. We walk the lane. Life brightens. Flooding light weaves braided gold from a field of sodden grain.

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HE RM I T C R A B S

By noon tomorrow, all here receding glance by rearview glance at endlessly fading grey, mile after multiplying mile, I’ll picture how today – right now, the tide at lowest ebb, the brick-red bars of sand  holding mirrors to the cloudless sky – my plodding tread perturbed in a rippling pool a scurry  of legs, a disembodied creature carrying home  upon its back. I carry mine in my head.

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S E E I N G RE D

Blizzard-bound, snowed under, walled-in … swallowed by a whirling world of white, a mapless maze of shifting waist-deep drifts, he wades and wallows. His hedgerows bent – though not like ours, beneath the weight of war and sorrow … once more the winter of our discontent – he looks ahead as if to greener pastures. Hapless cattle lowing to be fed, he holds his course, led – as we are too – by the heartening blaze of red that frames the doors, the eaves, the corner trim of every outlying Island barn and shed.

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E N VO I

Half-past dawn. Croaked awake, we watch the sky wake too, lead-grey, with the slow lurching launch of a half-dozen origami cranes – great blue herons – unfolding from their swaying pine-top perch above our ruddy rutted lane. They breast the air, a fleet of tattered flags unfurling stroke by rowing stroke against the wave-cresting wind … The morning hours pass. Noontime comes and goes. The tide ebbs and flows. We eye the glass-bright bay for fabric hung on creaking frames of ribs and spine – the flight of tail-trailing kites let loose and blown astray. • Our hearts rise with the sinking sun. Dusk falls. At end of day, we all come home to roost.

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S AI L I N G F R O M A N I S L A N D

What more could we lose chancing one last glance at the grey-toned sheet unwinding behind us where every hill and straight-drilled field slants to the shore? Look: the whole world seems inclined to salt at this dim hour – the windbreak pines along the lanes, sluggish cattle reclined in huddled herds, rolled haybales stored in lines against dark barns, all reduced to hazy shades and forms. See how pre-dawn light refines away the vibrant reds and greens – that crazy quilt of midday colour stretched end to end on this sea-hemmed place. Not for the lazy or hard-of-rising, or those who would spend an extra half-morning at home, this road where dipping headlamps redefine each bend will rise to meet all honouring the code of catching the day’s first boat – bred to gauge setting out (custom’s momentum unslowed by year upon year of added baggage) from measureless, meaningless miles away. Who would forego this true rite of passage – this rush and race against time’s steady sway?

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P A R T t wo

The Wide World

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THE RI S I N G

I rose to watch the morning rise from the dark sloping bay of meadow, the dark woods below, the dark hills beyond. Slowly … slowly daybreak’s great blue heron shifted stiffly on its stilted legs. My coffee sat unstirred, the black pool of night. I sipped. I sipped again. I stepped into stillness. Light lifted into grey creaking flight.

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S L E I G HT O F H A N D

Next-to-nothingness. The infinite density of a soul. A startled starling blown down the flue’s black hole. Was I a magician pulling from the empty false-bottom depths of a stovepipe hat a scarf that with one quick flick of the wrist became a white fluttering dove? The door swung wide, I uncupped my hands and flung out my arms. The midday sky lit up in a bronze flash of wings, a rich scattering splash of stars.

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AN D RÉ K E R T É S Z : T W O P H O T O G RAPHS

I Notice how even a happenstance snap – Budapest, 1920 … a couple peering, utterly rapt, through a knothole knocked in a fence topped by a tent’s striped flap – draws the mind’s wandering eye to focus on that alluringly unseen swirl spread beyond the man’s straw hat, the woman’s scarfed head: the whirling world of a touring circus. II There are none so blind … Not quite the gospel truth, but in shutter-stopped time where melody rings mute as muck-caked streets in Abony (note those ruts, tumbrel-cut in parallel), that sightless fiddler, a barefoot urchin his guiding light, imprints – proof positive – a candid glimpse of art’s imperative: that we come to our senses, one by one.

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CO RTO N A

The road a comma, a curving double-clutching climb to a round plateau, we paused right there – halfway to the hill town’s cobbled square – and caught our breath at the daybreak view from terracotta rooftop height. Were we walking on air? A pure panorama that sparkling plain below! Look down, I thought, and see like mighty gods the wide world still at rest. Or else like mere mortals: looked down upon and blessed.

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a u c h at n o i r

(1883)

after Jules Jouy Last night sat, a cat so black and of such size that it masked the sun and even blocked men’s eyes to the lustrous moon. When daylight broke the cat had slunk away. Or was the cat just grey, the men just drunk?

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BL U E N O T E C A T S

1  bouncing with bud They could see in the dark. His fingers. How infidels dance, feline nimble, a high-tailed prance on the keyboard’s picket fence. But his mind all thumbs, a stumble down an alley strewn with hangdog luck, at breakfast on the day Un Poco Loco (“a little crazy”) came to life – three deftly-struck cuts – he took a knife to a cat that crossed his table. And missed by a whisker. It hissed. Gone astray, he showed up hours late for his studio date. Almost the one that got away.

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2  moment’s notice What might have been. The night Coltrane dropped in, Bechet on his brain, he sat on opportunity’s sill and shot the breeze – the blues, Prestige and all that jazz … small talk of the dotted line – but took his cue from the office cat who leapt, the window wide, to find itself swept up in a purring embrace then placed in a cab by the curb. Commotion ensued. No papers signed, just shouted sheets of sound. Both tenor and vehicle slipped off down the street.

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U P AT M I N T O N ’ S

No slouch to start, Monk sat up straight and took sharp note when the door blew wide. Then he played it in stride: In Walked Bud, as if on cue.

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S E RG E C H A L O F F

Harnessed, yoked, reined in: for months, head hung low, body hitched to pain, anvildense, I pitied myself … a horse tethered to a block of forge-wrought iron flung from a wagon’s rickety bed. How we pull our own weight. • Or how it pulls us: last week, that photo of a fireman wrestling with a writhing hydranted hose, a one-headed Hydra gushing spasmodic gasps toward the imminent collapse of all that should not fall … But does. Body and soul. • Body and Soul. A blue surge of song. Baritone sax. A stooped shouldering of notes from the smoldering reed-rough

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depths of a Herculean horn … its swelling bell, its brassblinkered pads, its serpent’s neck coiled back upon itself. • How we bear our burdens. Steeped in dying, the tumor on his spine a leaden mass, he cut his final vinyl wheelchair-bound. How he purged himself, blowing sinuous riff-rich lines … Blue Serge. Then “Dead at 33,” the morning papers read.

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S TARS F E L L O N A L A B A M A

Today, for the first time in who knows how long, I put on Cannonball blowing one of our old songs – or tunes (we never really learned the words); a thousand times before I’d heard those breathtakingly rounded lines, Adderley at his abandoned best, until I had every scratch on that worn disk by heart: though not like this – not with an ear so utterly alert to how the ballad touch plays true to life’s little drama raised to a perfect pitch. My heart beats like a hammer now for what so wordlessly endures: the slow dance of our romance through the twist and shout of years.

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M YTHO L O G Y

1   T H E Y A LL LAU G HED Imagine vulgar Vulcan hammering two-fisted in his forge, muttering “Venus, Mars … ,” his genius a spite-fired furnace sputtering, his twisted tongue stammering. Razor subtle, his knotted cords of discord … rage-wrought wire netting, binding as a buckle. Yet, once embedded, we heard the gods chuckle one by one. Then the entire heavens roared.

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2   S T R A IG HTEN U P AN D F LY RIG HT What if I had succumbed to some gaudy Gorgon’s will-withering get-hither gaze and thus whiled away the rest of my days a sculpted hunk … just one more hard body? O Andromeda! O scandal of scandals … the way, rockbed-bound, you thrashed in the clutch of wave after wave, summoning my soft touch: O Perseus, come in wingèd sandals!

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3   NI GH T AN D D AY By day I dream of life’s dozen labours, my Herculean hazards: the push-and-pull of Hydra-headed crowds; the usual bull (load after massive load); the smiling neighbour’s Dog of Death; and – truly colossal in length and breadth – ungirdling sturdy Amazon thighs. By night, tossed and turned, uplifted to black skies, I, Antaeus, cry: “Mother … give me strength!”

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4   (L E T ’ S TAKE IT) N ICE AN D EAS Y Down that rutted road again, our fast-track route – fleet Atalanta, flat out, setting the pace, brash Hippomenes giving mad-dash chase, rationing (gifts from Venus) gilt globes of fruit. Then – as always, bittersweet! – that aftertaste of bridled bits beasts gnaw and gnash against … just desserts hand-picked by a goddess incensed: lush laurels trimmed with the pitted spoils of haste.

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5   WH A T I S THIS THIN G CALLED LO VE? How dared we, dear, go so against the grain, grafting to your pure basswood trunk – that straight shoot – my knotty oak … bole and branch, burl and root? Were we – Philemon, Baucis – daft? Or vain? Or just plain blessed by the gods’ delightful whims? None but guests from above could yield us this: out standing in love’s bright field, our bower of bliss, each year’s new growth more than a tangle of limbs.

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AT M c N E L L O ’ S

Hard men. Punters. A thirst for the ponies. I nursed my pint in the shadows and watched their equine faces rise then fall as they watched the Newmarket card play out, race by race, and, true to form, maligned an afternoon misspent on a slate of boldly misplaced wagers: It’s My Time, Slip Sliding Away, Sovereign Debt … top tips turned to also-rans. • Hope. The longshot we ride blinkered every day. Just ask that loveblind lad behind the bar. Run ragged, pillar to post, he liked his odds phoning bets to the bookie’s coy daughter. “A good-looking voice.” He rang up again. “Tell us her name, boys.” She had him haltered.

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TI M E WAS , W H E N I S P O R T E D from the Irish Time was, when I sported fine-spun spools of flaxen hair, not this coarse, bare-pated sprouting, a grey-cast field. Far better to yield thick raven-black tresses than to comb patchy headlands for a sparse ash-grey harvest. For now no more courting comes my way, no women won by old charms; tonight my thinning hair is grey – not how it one time was.

Time was …

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AF TE R Ó B R U A D A I R

1   P R E R OG ATIVE Duty demands it, so just for the record, I’ll venture this gambit, have a word with the bride. Like mother, like daughter, sweet blooms on soft branches, fair’s fair for the poet where customs abide. Even flim-flamming shysters she greets with forbearance; to thimblerig chancers she grants tribute too. Furtive glances disclose here’s my turn to be forward: verses tickling her fancy, I’ll ask for what’s due.

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2   UNT I T L ED Thirst troubles my task, this plowing alone – in time of abundance that tool lay unknown. Now bruised to the bone by a clay-laden blade, my fingers grow numb on the haft of a spade.

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M AYN O O T H , 1 8 2 2

Abandon any hopeful homeward glance: the bolted gates deny a mother’s prayers, defy a father’s curses and the stares of boys behind his back. Some books by chance I salvaged for the road: a Euclid worn from study; Ovid, Virgil, and the Greeks; and also our St. Columcille, who speaks of future honour for his race. For scorn from scholars huddled by a hedge, I teach the art of life; a ruined poet, now a spoiled priest, I talk in tongues and bow my head: O sing in me, Muse! I beseech. When flaming spirit fails to heal my flaw, I fall: usque ad necem, uisce-beatha.

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a n s l at ó i r

Avondale, p e i Harvest time. The high blue skies of August. The land aglow with gold. His brothers grown into two tall oaks, straight and true, the third son slouched in their shadow thrown along the field’s red edge. Would this be the year? The old man coughed, his body bent like a bleach-dyed windbreak pine. He pointed. “You and you,” he said. One brother took his seat in the jiggling rig, the other took the mare’s compliant blinkered head. “And you …” He knew that nod. He knew his lot. He took up his rod. His lowly job to hold erect the grain before the mower.

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dánta grádha

1   UL Y S SES Awake I dream myself at home and you away. The ocean’s gash healed over to a garish scar, you nurse love’s ache, a throbbing longing tender to the touch. I weave and unweave words. You gaze across the crested waves. I wonder could you miss me half as much.

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2   WH I T E S Q U ARE Blindfolded. Handcuffed. Stripped of rank … You are my country. Back to the wall, this white square pinned above my heart, I stand to face love’s volley. Its steady ready aim. Its singing sting. And not one shot a blank. Dublin 2010

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AF TE R P E T R A R C H Sí travïato è ’l folle mi’ desio … The folly of desire leads me astray. I follow in your tracks – my plodding pace, your light and nimble weave – along the rockstrewn switchback trail of Love. I swallow dust. I spur my trusty steed to surer paths – I dig my heels and slap and tug the reins. To no avail. The more I goad his flanks the less he heeds. Love steers his stumbling steps. • His lather up, he strains against my will until I bend then break and come uncinched, a deadweight bucked by his unbridled gait. At last we halt where blooming laurel yields its bitter fruit: no heartsore bruise to heal, others flinch and grimace at that tart taste. Elkhorn Ranch, Arizona

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RE D AN D G R E E N d’après Chagall Il a promis qu’ils peindraient la ville en rouge, et puis il a rougi. Ils l’ont rendue plutôt une nuance de vert, et aussi presque à l’envers. •

RO U G E E T V E R T after Chagall He promised they’d paint the town red, then blushed. They turned it almost green instead, and almost upside down.

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THE F AL L after Émile Goudeau Admired and despised, reviled, desired, she turned on her gypsy heel and turned both cheeks on sumptuous surroundings: Les Orients. She went for company far beneath herself and now pours booze for students in a cabaret where I delude myself in brute despair, brought to my knees (with four or five confrères) by a barmaid bent on playing her cold tricks. Did Samson court Delilah? My dream falls on the muddy floor. I follow it there and wallow.

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L A TZ I G AN E after Apollinaire The gypsy foresaw our two lives crossed by darkness. We bid her adieu, then from that pit bright Hope emerged: love, clumsy as a trained bear, danced upright at our command, though the bluebird shed its feathers and beggars forswore their Hail Marys. We knew full well that we were damned. Still, into the street love pulled us, hand in hand: all this the gypsy foretold.

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P ARTN E R S

They should be dancing. They should. They should be cutting the rug around the room, locked in step in style in each other’s arms. They should be palm to palm, hand on hipbone, small of the back. They should be doing the dip. They should be eye to eye. Their world should be the spinning glitter ball above their heads. Instead they lace on gloves and spread the ropes and climb into the squared circle, dimly lit, of love gone madly out of whack. They spar. They feint and parry and reel across the canvas deck. Fingers clenched, they launch long looping jabs meant just to sting. (They never swing from the heels.) Some hit the mark. They flinch. They dodge. They counter toe to toe. They could be dancing. They bob and weave around the ring. Then they clinch. 75

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S M O KE S I G N A L S

We shoulder what we can. The morning sky’s red clouds a warning – each day aim true – I sat astride my two-wheeled steed and plucked with my mind the high-strung bow of love. I knew the trail led home. What message would I code that you could read …  and how deliver? My hands in the grip of braking, steering … I slung across my back three long-stemmed roses, cellophane-  wrapped. My heart was aquiver.

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ELLIPSIS

Late night, the risen moon in full eclipse, the heavens extinguished, we lay like sole survivors of some great tremor, body by quivering body. Had nobody felt that quake but us? The apocalypse! Half-awake, you laughed. Sighed. The sky the soul of darkness, I heard again a camisole slip to the floor, imagined a body bright as Coleman Hawkins’ golden horn. Lips on lips, we played it slow … Body and Soul.

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BE D RO O M S U I T E

1   S UNDA Y MO RN IN G The eyelid crack of dawn. The first blush of light in the east, Aurora rising … stretching across the sky. I blink in bed. On either side, still dead to the waking world, a blissful body lies, each curled like a cat or a wife in the arms of sleep. They must be charmed. Or blessed. Strike me blind. What mortal would deny each seems divine? Deep in a dream, each twitches now like a goddess, Aurora rising … stretching across the sky.

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2   T H E O D YS S EY Athena, I thought: the grey-eyed goddess (musing behind her back) … dressing to kill – girding skirted loins for a boardroom war – so that when the mirror said “Make the bed,” I dreamt my drowsing self Odysseus endowed with a journeyman joiner’s skill, crafting from an olive trunk shafting the floor a corner post dowelled for a marriage stead. Complacencies of a rumpled duvet … of unplumped pillows … of hand-loomed cotton sheets (a trireme’s billowing sails!) thread-count rich. Did Olympus frown on Penelope, or deem undone deeds stay-at-homer feats? Faithful – boudoir-bound – I wait without a stitch.

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3 PICASSO “You flatter us either way,” she laughs – my winsome wife – when, eyeing her felicitous form, those alluring curves arranged in languidly mattressed lines of limbs and torso defined as if carved out by the razorthin tip of some great creator’s scimitar-bladed knife, I pause in mid-arpeggio – O the shameless appeal of shapely chords … Misty, Body and Soul, My Foolish Heart – and, picturing Picasso’s linocut Woman Reclining and Picador Playing Guitar, ask: “Which holds up the mirror – art or life?”

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4 M OONLIG HT IN VERMO N T Last night, you and I … and Moonlight in Vermont on the radio – turned low – that hoary hit from ’52 … Stan Getz guesting on tenor with Johnny Smith, guitar and sax in a soft sashay through a grace-noted grove of swaying sycamore chords. The B side of Tabu, I knew, that tune’s up-tempo beat more in step with our cast-off quilt of sultry summer heat … Yet, how like a rendezvous après-ski – the log-fire blush – our slaloming down the slippery slope of love. Did you hear near the ending that slick arpeggiated schuss?

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5   DOUB L I N G O N BRAS S Later, we’ll sweep our rosined bows across the singing strings and saw out to the concert-master’s measured baton beat the overture’s sweet curtain-raising strains, the cascading rush of notes arranged to hush the restless to the edge of their seats. We’ll watch from our orchestral perch the tent flaps close, the world reduced to a single shining ring. • But now we’re cued to the drum major’s silver-crowned mace and locked in marching step with the leggy stride of the top-hatted man on stilts, the twirlers’ swirling pace, the zoo of jungle cats caged-in on horse-drawn carts, the slow stampede of pachyderms on parade. Even our hearts race at the snare’s bright roll. We are the trombone’s slippery slide, the trumpet’s golden blare. The tuba’s oom-pah-oom-pah brings up the rear.

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6   M A K E O VER Vestis virum reddit, she likes to quote (the Latin tongue a tickle on her lips): “Clothes make the man.” So why not just devote a diverting hour to her hands-on-hips appraisal of my mock-mannequin pose, an all-of-me sizing-up of collar, chest, waist, inseam – hatband to wing-tipped toes: mere time well spent, not my last half-dollar. That I would invest, every red cent, one aisle over in eye-catching Lingerie: my pleasure to assess and nod assent – a befitting end to a frivolous spree. Carpe diem! Tickle me head to foot. Take no man’s measure by a pinstriped suit.

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7   M A GR I T T E This morning, sunlight streaming in shafts past the bedroom blinds – too bright … too early – my mind drifted back between those slanted slats to a steamy labyrinth of sheets and last night’s dream of a high-stepping stallion bridled, saddled, straddled, steered through that glowing grove in Magritte’s Le blanc-seing … a thinned-out first-growth stand of sturdy oak just turning leaf. The story of the autumn of my life? O that well-heeled damsel – hand in glove, reins at the ready, crop by her thigh – dressed for dressage. Piaffe! Passage!

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NOTES

The dedicatory epigraph is the opening quatrain of Irish poet Michael Hartnett’s sonnet “Dán Práta” in his volume A Necklace of Wrens (Dublin: Gallery Books, 1987). Hartnett translates the lines thus in “Potato Poem”: “Today I planted poems – / dung, knife, seed: / a field my page, / my pen a spade.” This quotation is reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Michael Hartnett and The Gallery Press. The epigraph to “Land of Youth” comes from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939). Hungarian-born André Kertész (1894–1985) was an iconic twentieth-century photographer. The bohemian cabaret known as Le Chat Noir flourished in the Montmartre quartier of Paris in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Jules Jouy (1855–1897) was one of its habitués. The two poems comprising “Blue Note Cats” derive from ­anecdotes about pianist Bud Powell and tenor saxophonist John Coltrane included in Richard Cook’s Blue Note Records: The Biography (Boston: Justin, Charles & Co., 2003). “Up at Minton’s” engages with jazz pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell at Minton’s Playhouse, a legendary Harlem jazz club. Serge Chaloff (1923–1957) was the pre-eminent jazz ­baritone saxophonist of his time. McNello’s is a pub in Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan, best known for its association with Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh. “Time Was, When I Sported” translates an anonymous “lay” from the gathering of Middle Irish poems known as

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Duanaire Finn: The Book of the Lays of Fionn, edited by Eoin MacNeill (London: Irish Texts Society, 1908). “After Ó Bruadair” translates lines from seventeenth-century Irish poet Dáibhí Ó Bruadair included in Duanaire Dháibhidh Uí Bhruadair/The Poems of David Ó Bruadair, 3 vols, edited by John C. MacErlean (London: Irish Texts Society, 1910–17). Dánta grádha is Irish for “love poems.” Émile Goudeau (1849–1906) was another habitué of Le Chat Noir. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was the foremost French poet of the early twentieth century. The following poems were written in dedication: “Blue Note Cats” for Jay Walton. “Envoi” for Mairéad, Caitríona, and Siobhán. “Time Was, When I Sported” for Fionán. “Delivering the News” is dedicated to the memory of Seamus Heaney.

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N TS

Acknowledgment is given to the following journals in which some of the poems in this book first appeared: Agenda: “Mythology,” “Magritte” Agni: “Artery,” “Cold Shoulder,” “Indeterminacy” Another Book: “Time Was, When I Sported,” “Picasso,” “Makeover” The Christian Science Monitor: “Mourning Doves,” “Trajectory” Compost: “Untitled” Consequence: “Morrígan” Cyphers: “Sunday Morning” The Fiddlehead: “Twist,” “Bank Swallows,” “Picnic Rock,” “Leviathan,” “Corbies,” “Three Cows,” “Smoke,” “Memory,” “Prerogative” Interdisciplinary Humanities: “Serge Chaloff” The Nashwaak Review: “Steers,” “Sailing from an Island,” “At McNello’s,” “An Slatóir” New Hibernia Review: “Mousetrap” North American Review: “The Odyssey” Notre Dame Review: “André Kertész: Two Photographs” Plainsongs: “Delivering the News” Poetry Ireland Review: “Letting Go,” “Envoi,” “Stars Fell on Alabama” RE:AL: Regarding Arts & Letters: “Two Horses” The Recorder: “The Goal,” “Blast,” “Moonlight in Vermont” The River Review/La Revue Rivière: “Shaving Out-of-Doors,” “Hindenburg Over West Cape” Salamander: “The Other Foot” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review: “Maynooth, 1822”

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