The Cousin
The Cousin
for Monica
After rosary, nodding as the voices gently pitch,
after five decades of knees on the purgatorial stone-floor,
the finale of this maestro of the Sorrowful Mysteries
as long as his lead performance
with Hail Holy Queens, the conversion of Russia,
the plight of Cardinal Mindszenty,
a swing of his whittled-down beads,
an irreverent blessing, dismissed the children
and their young cousin come to stay for the night.
In bed the children,
ghosts exorcized, forbidden imaginings sniggered-off behind hand,
tomorrow, the world —
slip jigged and reeled
soft-shoe
their in time heads and improvising ears
to the rise and fall of voices
rosined in the living-room.
Dawn already nothing more
than a wheezing, face-blueing tilley lamp
or the after-glow of a night gorse-fire
goaded by the wind;
shadows still hadn’t stepped out
of the whitewashed darkness
in the one bedroomed farm house
to witness the sack-race practice of an arthritic
at times more like the double-somersault of an Olympic athlete
in bed under flour bags
(bleached and stitched together)
try to pull his trousers, his tourniquet galluses
over perennial long Johns.
The wife: Sure she’s one of yer own kin,
dead to the world.
The fox sleeps, his reply.
Mementoes
by Dermot J. Archer
Sometimes something shapes itself
into a memento, displaces us,
the hard swallow, prolonged stare,
we’re back again with God rest them.
With the living it’s usually different
we bridge the world in imagination
crossing to meet distant loved ones.
On this dote Donegal day
sky languorous and limpid as a lullabied baby
a transatlantic flight furrows the harebell blue,
not a rainbow, a white bow,
at its end not gold but a crock of love
to share with kith and kin in New York or Atlanta.
(11)
Fiddle bows keened potatoes bealing black here
over a century and a half back,
friends and families finding
twill-woven love a fight —
love forced cemetery cold
in waked-cottages the night before departure.
Mementoes, precious as miraculous medals
of battery passengers on coffin ships to America,
loomed skeletal for the lost left behind
as they hurkled along a Famine road
hoking out rocks
or were moved closer to the mist in the Workhouse
to their own journey’s end —
the lime-burnt Black Wall.
bealing: festering /pus from a sore
hurkle: walk with a stoop
hoke: dig out
The Smoking Jacket
The Smoking Jacket
for my Mother
Sometimes very early when the cold bruises the bone
my hand still reaches out for that smoking jacket,
still kept and still as eye-burgling —
Carnaby Street sixties tailoring merely a skelly
in contrast to your exquisite layering.
Woven wool the colour of hibernating heathers
in a Donegal winterscape, darker
where roots dig into peat, the lining
harebell blue, a harbinger of other days
as if Irish weather might turn itself inside-out.
My childhood delivered excitement to a scatter of envelopes
from Simplicity, Me Calls, Vogue, Butterick, adult jigsaws;
for years I watched you futter with paper wrinkles
aged somewhere between cigarette paper and tracing paper massaged onto a tabula rasa.
Scissors cutting, tailors’ hard-chalk stencilling
always left you with lips magically dispensing
to pin the pattern; they put me in mind now
of a pincushion or the pierced lips of a least angry punk,
music more melodious when my organist
finally pedals the Singer.
Dancing on the head of a pin?
You’re too busy sewing rainbows, sunsets.
That accidental tear in the pocket I later made
invisibly mended by you, light as threads in a spider’s web,
isn’t the only presence lost to the eye.
In waning light
“If our leg or arm offend us, we covet by all means possible to redress it; and if we labour of a bodily disease, we send for a physician; but for diseases of the mind, we take no notice of
them . . . We are torn in pieces by our passions, as so many wild horses.” — Robert Burton, (1577–1640)
Where the sun bends
it shatters.
Where the body breaks
it speaks.
There is no measure
that keeps our silence,
no glad noise to mark
the dark, starved places
that blur our being.
Once I was eager
to remain
behind the door
that blocks the light,
content to peer through
the cracks into
the sound of others
pain.
Do not think, beloved
that I will do so, again.
We are made of more
than endings
and tangled years.
There are sicknesses that cure
the sick,
crimes that reconcile
the criminal to himself.
Only when the wound
opens can we bend.