After You Died, and: Watching the Fire Take Your Body, and: The Door, and: Empty Space Poem, Eighteen Months, and: Between Here and There
Rent from DeepDyve- After You Died, and: Watching the Fire Take Your Body, and: The Door, and: Empty Space Poem, Eighteen Months, and: Between Here and There
- After You Died
I am in Dunnes Stores thumbing through a rack of wetsuits trying to find an age 4 for your son.
You are in a rented room in Delhi smoking and making notes for your latest film.
These days I am always stuck in Dunnes Stores trying to find the right wetsuit. You are always alone in a narrow room, smoking and making notes. Your heart is failing but you still don’t know it. It’s hard to breathe—for me, as well as for you. Sometimes I wish I could stop loving you.
I am sitting up in bed in the rented house. The cover is black and white stripes. There are two windows to the room. In front of me lies the inlet and a big lump of raw-boned hillside crowned with soft soggy cloud. The window beside the bed frames sky and thin coloured sands woven with marram grass. I am thinking of the drawer I opened in my mother’s study, the hundreds of your photos that I found there from that first India trip. [End Page 33]
I dipped Thomas into the waves. He liked being dipped, he slapped at the water and splashed. He’s one year old and one month. You’ve been dead for seven months. When I was fifteen I dipped you into the waves.
When I saw the Sydney Nolan picture of Ned Kelly’s sister quilting his black helmet I knew that’s what I’d always tried to do. A useless love-filled gesture, the failure of the gesture, the blood on the blue quilting, the blood on your face in the morgue.
If it hadn’t been India it would have been somewhere else. Perhaps I’m glad it was India. Perhaps I’m glad that your window opened onto the market. And over the road, the pigeons, soft coloured rows in their boxes, talking in low tumbling voices drowned out by the roar from the street. [End Page 34]
Did you drown too in India? There was the photo of the Ganges, the liquid light floating the evening water, the way you broke it as you raised your hand to wave, the time that you went swimming from the ghats. [End Page 35]
Kerry Hardie has published seven collections of poetry with The Gallery Press, Ireland. Her Selected Poems were published by Bloodaxe Books, U.K., which will also publish her next collection in 2014. She has also written two novels, Hannie Bennett’s Winter Marriage (Harper Collins) and The Bird Woman (Little, Brown) and is currently working on a third. She has won many prizes, including the National Poetry Prize (Ireland) and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry, University of St. Thomas, Minnesota.
- Watching the Fire Take Your Body
Remember those blue irises I’d left for years?
You dug them out with Sean’s big fork, then left them on the grass for me to split.
After you’d gone I wrenched and tore. Got nowhere, gave up struggling, fetched the spade.
That mat of yellow roots, the slicing blade, the last despairing heave, the rain of soil—
the shock still live and scorching through my flesh. [End Page 36]
Kerry Hardie has published seven collections of poetry with The Gallery Press, Ireland. Her Selected Poems were published by Bloodaxe Books, U.K., which will also publish her next collection in 2014. She has also written two novels, Hannie Bennett’s Winter Marriage (Harper Collins) and The Bird Woman (Little, Brown) and is currently working on a third. She has won many prizes, including the National Poetry Prize (Ireland) and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry, University of St. Thomas, Minnesota.
- The Door
Suddenly there was a different significance in everything. Sometimes I disappeared from myself. Everything stilled. I’d...
