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  • Filíocht Nua:New Poetry
  • John McAuliffe

The Quiet Life

Is it this you want, the still center of the quiet life, its ticking clock, the white goods' hum and on, off click, next-door's pipes and creaking stair? It could be, let's face it, anywhere, the usual birds sleep in its shadow and from every side, in stereo, a surf of noise going who knows where, traffic clutching, flown, a landing plane, the trains' two-beat come and go . . . and outside the mirrored window, closer to home, in the tended garden and the undergrowth, what rustles there, or its wake, might be grass stirring or, on their way, even your discarded half-read papers. [End Page 37]

* * *

Town

I leave tomorrow and the night finds me, where else, down by the river, its current quiet and regular as a pulse, silvery dark where the banked trees grow around the outflow pipes. A bird takes off nearby and goes to ground in a commuter's site: its unpainted cement is either half-finished or half-dismantled. farther off I can see, bright as an oilrig, the Co-op shine and foam, humming its bottom line. The town's lit up but no one comes back to reminisce intent as some evangelist smashing fossils, making a religion out of feeling homesick. empty river, indifferent night; no joke to leave, grow older, return and say, then what? On it all, the glowing river twists the ground shut. [End Page 38]

* * *

Tinnitus

My father's tinnitus is like the hiss off a water cooler, only louder. And it doesn't just stop like, say, a hand-dryer—the worst is it comes and goes. Or you shine a light on it and it looks permanent as the sea, a tideless sea that won't go away. The masker he's been prescribed is a tiny machine, an arc of white noise that blacks out a lot but can't absorb the interference totally any more than you or I—taking the air, stirring milk into coffee, daydreaming through the six o'clock news, trying to sleep on a wet night— can simply switch off what's always there, a particular memory nagging away, the erosive splash off a little river wearing away the road, say, on the Connor Pass, a day out, through which he'd accelerate in the flash, orange Capri. [End Page 39]

* * *

Road Safety

I check the convex mirror in the hedge across the way and see, beyond plantations of fir and rowan, the roadside monument to the killings of 1918 and 1921 and, up the road, away from this house on its bed of unraveled blue pencil and its hill of water, the empty crossroads for Knocknagoshel and Duagh but I am seen too in the hedge around this convex mirror, wild with blackberries and gooseberries, dribbling mice, and a hen pheasant that will soon wander the grassy margin, among the thistles and the ragwort and the nettles and will halt there a while, quiet out, seeing time pass, looking in every direction. [End Page 40]

* * *

The Hundred Towns

"There is no capital of the world." Czeslaw Milosz We negotiate      ring road, tunnel and ferry           but by noon GMT are nowhere, i.e., an endless suburb      stacked and balanced           like washing up. The day out seems set to fray      into a relief map of noise           the kids crying where until you call a halt      and we abandon the car           and follow a sign pointing east: we reach the beaten path, tar and mud,      and trundle buggies up blind, rising corners,           piggyback past tourists consulting an A–Z and a man with children who smiles      at the sight of us:           "Another day in paradise. . . ." In a mile, an hour, we lay out the picnic,      a tartan rug on the side of a hill,            greenly adrift in the public park: a barbecue smokes the wind,      a lean-to of a caff            hosts wake-up karaoke, blues and big band [End Page 41] (someone murders "It's oh so quiet"),      quad bikes buzz and weave           earning a crowd with their figure of eight and across the river Canary Wharf glitters...

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