Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

THE CUCKOO

“It’s not like me,” he writes, “to write like this.But something, something potent, remains fromour cryptic exchange last week.” He feels,and hopes she’ll feel, in his infectiouslyself-centred words, a tug of secrecy.

He complains that for her sake his fallen heartransacks his mouth for a tongue more fertile,a mastery of rude yet emailable lines,plain terms befitting a crisis of lust.

“I never write like this,” he writes, “or dreamso primitively, as last night againI dreamt of you. What is it, Kate, that wedsadultery to life? And what confirms us?We for whom an unspent kiss is death.”

THE MAPPING OF LIMBO

Down here there is no sun,no image of the day to speak of.

You must be forcefulin your concentration.

Cold cartography mustdefine your heart.

For the children will come.They will swim around you,

hungry for play.And you must disdain them.

Against the great dreamthat is the light of their need,

it falls to you, worker,to be a counter-dream.

EARTH RADIO

The Goat O’Hara is now five years dead.Tonight he was publically rememberedin a manner that some in the town would sayshowcased the O’Hara’s oddness once again:an hour of stargazing on Tumgesh bog.The Goat was struck by a car not far from there.It was a drunk-driven car, and he himselfwas drunk, heading home long after closing,a laneway shade, waddling and unaware.

For his two brothers the loss was immense.They’d been a trio of farming bachelors,and the pair were ill-equipped to handle lifewithout that threefold tangibility.So Frank and Luke forced the door of the past.The Goat had long claimed he’d been takenby extra-terrestrials: twice in his teens,again on the night after his mother died,and again on the night of his fortieth.

When cajoled to tell the story in the pub,he could always flummox a new scepticwith his conviction. Slivers of truth,glimpsed both in his way of recountingthe mood of interstellar politicshe said he’d sensed in the queer medicineof his captivity, and the grey footnoteof his abduction dates, gave him an air.You’d mark him a local man getting drunk

in capitulation to heavy wonders,a good man flanked by two similar types,drunk too but estimably listening.It seemed that half the town was there tonight.“Hard to believe it’s five years, God help us,”we said, as Luke and Frank shuttled us out,five nervous loads in two battered tractors,fording as no car could the sunken tracksthat lead abysmally to the chosen field.

The flood-lit scene was not entirely madfor those who’d been involved in previous years,but the smiles of newcomers told you their mindswere blown to the greenest incredulityas Frank and Luke with microphones denouncedthe night sky for its cold conspiracies,spoke echoingly of transcendental shipsundoing every farmstead in their wake,and then, for sibling drama, killed the lights.

MARGARET

I am often asked about the success of the group.And to go around citing heaven wouldn’t do.I tell them baldly that our system of healing

is above all others. When an interviewer laughs,my tongue secretes my will: a layman’s giftednessspliced to cool seniority, a jauntiness of diction

for the intangibles. Margaret is a handy case.Psychiatric through her thirties, she came to us.Our deeming her a spirit biochemically fettered

was a breakthrough. Doses of music therapyclipped her blackness and slowed her to a fuller life:hillwalking, Jack Russell pups, some admin

at our offices. There’s a book about her journeygone to press. But one could never tell Margaret’sstory completely. You see, it could not be accepted

that the drumming left us all almost deranged,or that a river appeared in the conference centre floorfrom which a muscular Christ bore up...