Filiocht Nua: New Poetry

The Aluminum Box

It demands to be handled with care, has a seat to itself on the bus from Enniskillen.
John Wayne is in it and Clint Walker and Joel McCrea
and Randaloph Scott, who never lost his hat,
Witchita and Dodge City and Boothill.
Strongbox, capsule, payload, portable safe,
with all of us riding shotgun.

A big-arsed countrywoman sits on it once,
reversing in, oblivious. We watch her leap
as though bitten by a rattlesnake.
Steve Reeves is in it and Red Buttons and Rip Torn,
its sealed stillness holding the light at bay
between sleepy, no-horse towns.
"Kirk" and "Burt'" we mutter, like bilious frogs.

A couple of nights at the Astral,
two at the Ritz. Next stop the Adelphi.
Marilyn is in it and Gina and Sophia Loren,
the saloon girls of El Paso and Santa Fé
with skirts at the ready.
Open-mouthed, we will yearn through smoky air
for the lips of Kim Novak and Tuesday Weld.

Getting off a mile from the town
is like leaving the stalls before the trailers finish.
"Big crowd on the bus, son? " my mother drawls,
her habitual question.
"It was packed, Maw," I tell her, "packed to the door."

The Builder

Even at fifty you were in demand,
three hayfields of your handiwork on show
each summer where your father's farm sloped

to the main road. So often we watched you step
into that rough circle. Your arms swept
round the prongs of dangerous pitchforks.
You seemed to embrace entire meadows,
patting them like aprons about your knees.

As you rose on your own foundation, people waved
from bus windows. The more you spread and trod,
above head-height, above hedge-height, the further we
had to step back not to lose sight of you.

You never looked like falling. Braced at the top,
you fielded the two hay-ropes, threw them back
nonchalantly between your legs
and prepared to return to the earth.

No memory now to match this; you gather your skirts
and slide with a girlish flourish
down the rick face,
land like a gymnast among our outstretched arms.

Finalities

Nothing so final as that leaning in of children and grandchildren,
their lips touching your face,
their hands on yours.

Unless it be the stepping back to become
onlookers. Now the undertaker's hands
are tactfully matter-of-fact. They pat your hair
that the shroud may close over.

Then the lid fitting exactly.
Your name on the lid.

The Hole In The Roof

Two slates, perhaps, no more.
Yet, nights of storm,
it haunts me sleepless,
gradual and unrepaired.
I think of them looking up
until it becomes
the one thing I have left them,
their gaping hurt
bare now and forever
to the wind and the sky.

Fireflies

The lights come on and stay on under the trees. Visibly a whole neighborhood inhabits the dusk,
so punctual and in place it seems to deny
dark its dominion. Nothing will go astray,
the porch lamps promise. Sudden, as though a match
failed to ignite at the foot of the garden, the first squibs
trouble the eye. Impossible not to share
that sportive, abortive, clumsy, where-are-we-now
dalliance with night, such soothing restlessness.
What should we make of fireflies, their quick flare
of promise and disappointment, their throwaway style?
Our heads turn this way and that. We are loath to miss
such jauntiness in nature. Those fugitive selves,
winged and at random! Our flickery might-have beens
come up from the woods to haunt us! Our yet-to-be
as tentative frolic! What do the fireflies say?

That loneliness made light of becomes at last
convivial singleness? That any antic spark
cruising the void might titillate creation?
And whether they spend themselves, or go to ground,
or drift with their lights out, they have left the gloom,
for as long as our eyes take to absorb such absence,
less than it...