A Question of Time
There’s a cup on my desk, someone’s been here
before, in my chair, at my keyboard, it was this morning
when I tried to call you at home and got your mother
whom I was not expecting, so apologised saying
I had the wrong number. No, she said, who do you want,
You I said, but she replied, you were not at home. I felt
a nightmarish worry – I wished to cancel my subscription to
the waterfalls and the peaks and the lapis-winged dragonflies
to a heart that would crystallise into a long set
of principles, into harsh right angles, into the small
mouth of a pipe whose notes only played
but a summary of any true sound
Long days, tiny canoes of light
flitting across the grass once the sun goes down.
I want to wear black all the time to funerals
in my mind, I want to lie on a beach and fold
and bend and tear books into churches. As for the black
there have been poems and alphabets written about that colour –
Rimbaud’s corset, his first heavy note, his sun gone down.
And whilst I might separate black from another colour
whilst I might stare into the garden, into the rain-streaked stones
and the damp wicker chairs seeing the grey of fallen
angels, I will wait too for the garden to end, for sunset to taper
– the wind whistling through an empty bodice,
the blue ghosts of dragonflies, principles, sounds
and a man and a compass sleeping in the same boat
unkempt and uncorresponding.
Poetry Ireland Review Issue 119:
Poetry Ireland Review Issue 119 includes new poems by 48 poets including Frank Ormsby, John Kinsella, Rachel Coventry, Aifric Mac Aodha, Gerald Dawe, Alice Miller and Claire Potter. Also included are translations by Richard Begbie and Kirsten Lodge, an essay on Bishop, Lowell, Heaney and Grennan by David McLoghlin, and reviews of Paul Muldoon, Paul Durcan, Sarah Clancy, Medbh McGuckian, Kate Tempest, George the Poet, and many more. The issue also features photography by Hugh O'Conor, Dominic Turner, Sheila McSweeney, Fergus Bourke and John Minihan.