Poems

POEMS LINDA McCARRISTON local In an Irish pub, vatican of stout and fags, I travel back a family generation, to the land of an honest man’s failing. With such no other island is so richly endowed. I myself was many years inclined to honesty but now deceive myself perhaps and others, having come a decade—more—ago to the crossroad where the pure refusal of a drunk’s grave meets the compromise of walking the crooked lane conscious. I cannot bear to watch the man who so delights them in a parody of dance but watch them watch him with smiles that shine communal and benign, whose brother, just months past, himself was swept—like an ill-advised explorer in the ocean-caves below this Fisher Street bar—away in the gay and honest waves of drink turned savage in the innerworld, turned toothed and clawed in the changeless village tide that always turns. POEMS 11 on holiday: county clare Last night in the pub at the bar with the village charmers, and truly charming they were—word and eye— on the very street under which the Atlantic has millenia since carved its underworld of caves —you can hear them underfoot if you listen out on the burren like the history here under laughter— I saw the back of your head it was a younger you but you in a man intent on the singing I saw the face of you a weightier you in the photo above him on the wall. Old, old are the caves and graygreen the waves that run through them each time taking a scrim of old limestone back to the sea. A girl sang an Irish song of lost love, someone gone over the very ocean. POEMS 12 as memory I believe I will not be blown away tonight from the corner of this fine high house in Ireland. I believe the rain —nightmare hands of it long-fingered grasping from the roofline—will not pinch the latched window open, not push the door to. I am not the mare buffeted, days now, in the pasture below me, head down, rump to the sea, worn so out from standing she won’t graze. Child at the window, a voice says, Heart, come to the table for tea. POEMS 13 ...