Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

Filíocht Nua:

New Poetry

Tenacities, Cork in April

for Dorothy Medeiros

Dried leaves race the bus through Youghal, a litter of withered brown-paper children,
and a Labrador with oozing rheumy eyes
decides to plunder the brúscar.
Crows fly in for a conference,
envoys from out-of-town branches.

The kissers on Patrick's Hill tilt leewards,
the girl's hair flurries round the boy's neck
like a saluki hound in a breeze. They clench
collars and coats to stay perpendicular
as handbraked cars creak inchwise
down the scarp.

The Stylist

The Chinese micro-carver Chen Zhongen
can inscribe poems on a single strand of hair

I asked for a headful of sonnets
(Petrarchan) from scalp to split end.
    Short-haired one, said he,
    the most I can do for youis a crop of haiku.

A bit miffed, I looked round the room
at enormous close-ups of women
with sestinas twirled through their ringlets,
thousands of Möbius strips
curled 'round recidivist words.

A man with a brylled-black mullet
sported tercets over his ears,
and a thicket of octets ending in knots:
floccinaucinihilipilification,
sesquipedalian,
hyperfecund,
the days of the week in Old Norse.

Poems with upbeat conclusions
on the flick-ups of nymphet models.
Bawdy love lyrics from the 1700s
hidden inside dense dark shag perms,
and rhyming couplets at the outer tips
of a blonde boy's barely-there eyebrows.

No fair, I thought; oh, to be Rapunzel
with space for the lost Latin epics
of Valerius Flaccus cascading
down past my backside.

But no; I got Ezra Pound's petals
above my wet and blackening brow.
Some highlights from Japanese wisdom.
And one of the stylist's own:
          What hard work this is,
          blinded by flurries of snow:
          your psoriasis.

Rockbed

A ship astray on the flats, its people flayed
by cold on Lovell's Island. The blood

gives up in time, fails to stoke the heart,
abandons the peninsulas of fingers.

The couple are new to each other, and make
their honeymoon bed in a cup of rock on a hill.

Clumsy embrace, needled and pinned arms
moving like the string-guided float

of puppet limbs. They tear their lips apart,
each leaving shreds of flesh on the other.

They are found frost-soldered together,
a statuary in garbled clothes.

Diarmuid and Gráinne shared a back-breaking
bed on bare rock. Some nights, we buck

and squirm as if sleeping on flint. My arm
in the morning, heavy as a club, sweeps

clocks and books to the floor, clattercrash.
Our shapes in the sheets are letters

from a giant alphabet, a sloppy Cyrillic.
The pillows smell of breath and hair,

keep palimpsest records
of old dreams under new.

Catalepsy. Provoked by the Sound of a Tuning Fork

No matter that she smells crushed diamonds, the white
gunpowder before it bursts

in small subdued claps.
The camera's flash still
catches her unaware.

A tuning fork, big as a hay
pike, stands guard behind her.
Its long low thrum

has stunned her spine.
The echo remains, mantra
of a church bell, one peal,

faraway; a tinny taste at her
backmost teeth. The sound
presses thumbs against

the lintels of bone
over her eyes. She sits,
a frumpy mannequin,

in studied confusion.
She seems to have dropped
something—crockery, a doll

with a porcelain head—and
her hands wring the air. Words
whistle wetly through the pinhole

made by her lips, as the sound
and resound of one note smote
from a wooden bench grinds

at her tailbone. His nib scoots
across pages, scratching notes
on the woman he struck into stone.

Based on Jean-Martin Charcot's 1880s Iconographie: photographs of patients with hysteria, Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris.

Archimedes

The bathroom floor is awash
with the weight of his Grecian gut,

the volume of his backside and thighs
slides in greasy...