by Patrick Dillon

I see they’ve put a new McSorley in the ground
along with all the McBrides and Hanrahans
the Smiths and Smythes, as though in the spring
something good might come of it
planting an empty bulb inside a box.
And yet something must be done with them
to those who gave life to trousers and brown coats.
A wind scrapes the Earth.
Hydrangeas fall on hard times.
To leave them haphazard where they fell
usually alone, sometimes in a chair
plunged into the soup
to have so many of these monuments at the side of the road
would make a mockery of us.  And all our History.
It would be hard to know where to go or what to do.
We cannot sell them.  We do not eat them.
They cut the legs off art.  In sunnier climes
our fathers might be stacked in concrete casks
six or seven storeys high.
Here there’s nothing for it but to plant them out in rows
new villages of words and pots and stone
so that we may stand alone and be open to the wind.
There’s not much dancing can be got from these puppets
however well bright bones and jaws might drag
and dangle in a tango.  I suppose you’d say
they took a step and vanished in our eyes.
They go to where the jive was spun and jigs aplenty
and well turned calves and old at twenty.
We talk of corms and crocuses.
What we hide is how we take their place.
It is an old gavotte and we will honour it.

by Patrick Dillon

Once upon a time when yellow hens
laid purple eggs, not long before she touched
the car and went off into the photograph.
high above the poultry sodden straw
my sister crawls before me on the beam.
I will remember this
the chill of a fool’s danger.  We’d got it wrong.
Space and things that should have been in front
of us had slipped and swung below.
The air pranced.
Death looked on.

I will remember this.
My part in the clamour of rotten duck eggs.
Not her voice, not her face
but the sandals and her smiling calves
the squares of thread raised rough and white on beige
and that she spoke to me
turned and told me something never to forget
long ago
when playful plastic hens dropped eggs like answers.

God takes the best for himself they said.
I was left with the rest.
With alphabets and joined up letters
with elders and their tattered tales
of war and Devon Tuttle.
Their titled toes
the flippant tails, the waltzing ways
of sweats and quitters.
With dogs and cats and ponies to love.
Between the lines the slamming grey of car doors.
My toes itched.

How did a girl become a word, her name
a prayer falling like a key into the dark?
We all knew where her sandals were, stuck
upstairs in the hush of the cupboard
in the mouthing silence, waiting in
plastic for her stubborn broken beads.

by Patrick Dillon

We go blind at the deskpit
Fussing out our commas
Feeling for something like a teapot
That will contain everything.
Life is less.
Death will sort us out.
Someone will find a sparrow’s collarbone
Our absence
Will glower above the waves.

by Joanne Lowery

For lack of a better name, let us call
this darkness “Klimt.”  True, squares
of white and gold tile his paintings,
naked fish blooming among flowers
that wink, bubbles on their way to nowhere.
Vienna had traded candlelight for electric chandeliers.
At times, a woman’s thin face, her simple legs,
her drying hair made him happy.
You — even you — turn a plastic switch
to make life meaningful.
Now beauty can be understood,
and the war that everyone knows is coming
sparkles in the distance like stars.