Filiocht Nua: New Poetry

Bournemouth

Jane of the vanilla skin and me
in the linen room of the Cumberland Hotel
just killing time. She cut my hair.
Or maybe I cut hers. Something anyway.
We'd pink uniforms, short nails,
jokes about used condoms.
She sang Blondie songs like they were news,
wore blue eye-liner and did extra rooms.
We took a trip to Bournemouth
and ate ice cream with our sandals kicked to shore.
She said "nobody talks of leaving any more."
Then it was August. We both went home

The Middle of Nowhere

They had plans. Hers included curtains and towels;
his, someplace to be. She'd liked the smell of his neck
and the way he had of turning her around. He used to say
his weakness was for neatness: he liked the spice rack
alphabetical and the flowers color-grouped; he liked
his socks to be progressive shades of grey. He was a deadman
on the suburban line: he stored his tickets in a filing drawer
according to station name and miles from home.

Once she came to as the door slammed shut to find
a pot on the cooker had boiled dry and buried the room
in a kind of knotted blackness that hurt her to breathe
and took over her clothes and her skin and hair for days.
This is not what she'd imagined, not at all:
the waiting on and off again for dinner to cook,
for the pan to burn, for the door to open,
for his voice in the hall, for his train to shuffle away.

She had a violet trouser suit once, and a raffia bag.
She'd painted her toenails and danced with her arms
and known the words to songs on the radio.
She'd had her palm read and still had it somewhere,
advice against travel and a bushy browed man.
She dreamed of a beach with silk gold sand
and a Frenchman in plimsolls and shorts. Or of herself,
freewheeling downhill with the sun on her too easy face.

Anne said he was a bad idea, but Anne wasn't here now
and neither was he. Today, she spent hours in the Museum
looking at stones and other broken things. She nearly cried
in the Ladies, but it passed. She went out to look at the boats
that had been carved from whole tree trunks, that survived.
It's not much to go on, but it does. She wakes again, cold
and remote. The radio repeats the same headlines and refrains.
Next door is a two-nighter, paid up front, who is watching

re-runs of "The Honeymooners" and "Gardening World," or else
he is not, and the telly will stay primed and benedictory all night.
She's been here for two weeks now, and it's wearing thin.
They want to know how long she'll be staying, and if she
might like to pay off her account. She strings out on digestives
or caffeine. Her phone's off the hook; she has been cradling it again
and has let it fall. She thinks its bleats could almost be his voice
saying something like: what happened; are you listening; are you there?

The Local Accent

This river is pronounced by granite drag.
It is a matter of inflection, of knowing what
to emphasize, and what to let drift away,
just as a slipping aspen leaf makes barely a flicker,
one gaffe in the conversation between the current
and the flow; a stifled yawn, a darkness reimbursed.

While underneath, the thing that falls through shadow
is full of its own occasion. Weighty and dull,
it longs for water, the lacquer and slip of it,
the way it won't allow for brightness on its back,
but flips around to where its fall is a wet-wool,
sodden thing that will break at any moment, and undo.

Something is coming loose like aspen leaves, or froth.
Or maunder, letting itself...