Calliope
She knows someone is parsing her body,
Trying to decipher the rules by which she is put together.
She knows someone is observing her principles
of engagement as subject,
working up a theory of how
or if the head or heart rules.
She feels someone’s gaze, as the morphology of her limbs,
her face is searched for some logic of expression,
even the size of her thumbs, the shape of her fingernails,
her teeth set into a formula of who she might be as she inflects her voice.
She knows someone is secretly wondering how she is conjugated
by tense, mood, assessing the aptness of adjectives, adverbs.
And she, author, oracle, desires to be the shaper of her own truth.
Poet, not muse.
*From the collection In Other Words published by Salmonpoetry 2010.
Without a Word
For Andy
Had I not been born first, I would have been the injured one,
tossed into a tunnel where the train stopped.
I would have been the one with my lungs clogged
as I struggled for my first breath at the end
where the light was.
Had I not been born first, I would not be able to contemplate
the terror of your limitations,
and what you could have been if you were not hurt.
You arrived after me, with wounds like the Christ,
your limp body and broken mind sacrificed
on some as yet ill-defined cross.
Like Thomas, I press my fingers into the holes
And is this really you?
Had I not been born first I would have been swirled
into that vortex of silence,
left as you are.
Dire Consequences
Cassandra. I gave her the name, refused the metaphor.
Each day has its own supremacy of best laid plans
Yet,
she came when she was called,
walked across the road as if.
The lorry, a second out
slid and dragged her into timelessness.
The hours after seemed as before.
She lies like Cordelia, I weep like Lear,
wonder if there was a choice of outcomes
in that moment. It took the road
two days to bleed from the thaw.
We shook woodshavings on it,
seeds to make it something else,
so she might rise like a phoenix from the snow.
I call her name into the frozen air, Cassie! Cassie!
I stroke her first coat. Condemned by fate,
who would believe she was never meant to go?
Something is happening inside my tense fragile skin
like ageing, warning of the future.
In Other Words
I'd like to gloss your post-modern grin
with a labio-dental fricative to begin.
Then, a bilabial plosive.
God knows what would come out, if I started to use
my west-of-the-Shannon round vowels,
which you are colonizing.
As you purse your lips to front yours,
I notice that it goes very well with your chic-about-town suit.
You speak foreign D4 to the men in my parts,
who respect sibilants that don't make a difference.
Know that SHTOP is surprise, not a rural marker
separating them from the wise fellas
up at the University.
Or a noun,
something they would do to sort out
A poseur like you.
You flex your intellectual biceps
obsessed, not only by your manhood
but by the kind of man you are.
The genre, an obtrusive voice,
your life, a metafiction,
a revised identity.
Now, your grandmother, a professional woman
who walked to school from May to October
in her bare feet
is unsure about her story.
It is not one of the images you are staying with today.
Your voice echoes in the 1970s box architecture
of the new Irish University,
hollow as Plato's Cave.
The sign of the times no more than
the minute's silence for Guinness,
for Irish before the singing of the national anthem.
The men in my parts still check the sky for the weather,
are ensconced in a world that loves them,
will turn up at the funeral,
pay respects to one of the best.
You wish your words still had meaning like theirs.
It's what you left behind,
men pulling their wellies up over wool socks to go out on the land,
while you lace up your expensive trainers
to jog on an asphalt running track.
You can hear the chortling of a bird
coaxing you back to your senses.
It would be too much like innocence
To know whether it is a lark in the morning,
a sparrow chattering, or a robin claiming territory.
You put up the volume, adjust your earphones,
check the zapper for the electric gate is in your pocket,
home is only a block away.
*From the collection In Other Words published by Salmonpoetry 2010.
