Gerard Smyth

for Simon

Our second son, the wanderer
has sent a postcard home that shows
the smiling people of Cambodia,
...

In the middle of the night her bark was one
that seemed to reach the point of ecstasy.
Fireworks and wind-chimes frightened her,
our little dog who lived through the
...

Grandmother never allowed the electric in
because it was that fearful thing
that killed her son in America.
...

Fellini recorded his dreams
in sketch books and diaries.
Dreams in which he saw his obituary on the page
and made love to glamorous Anita Ekberg.
...

It was the year of yeah, yeah, yeah
and hair the length of Christ's.
The ambling horse,
a dray-nag pulling a laden cart
...

On an evening that showed me once
how the end of August comes to sadden us,
I gathered up the fallen cones
in the corner of the yard,
...

for Philip King

After a few false starts, the harmonica player
picks up a bluesy melody or slow air,
a cracked tune or one that was lost
and found, borrowed and returned
...

Perhaps I never stopped to look
or all the days were days of hurry,
of running with news, running too fast.
...

The things we keep are not the things we need:
the red flag and porcelain horse.
A calendar out of date since John Lennon was shot.
Those heaps that grow in the attic
...

At the end of his life he called for
a cup of Pyrenees water
to cleanse his heart, prepare it for
its final prelude: the homecoming to Warsaw,
...

Vladimir Holan was right:
the kitchen is the best place to be
with its coffee aroma, brewing tea,
prattle of the family and purr
...

But I woke in an old ruin that the winds howled through

W B Yeats



Back in the age of candlelight and grandeur,

of banquets in the chieftain's mansion,

there was meat and drink

for the ladies and the lords

and tunes upon the harpsichord.



But all that is history, the candle-factory

ceased to prosper, ceased to exist.

In the ruins of the chieftain's mansion

there are trespassers in a state of bliss.

They are there for the dope and the pills.



There's a cider-party, a ghetto-blaster

blasting Lady Gaga; chicken bones

and burger wrappers littering what remains

of the halls of marble, the rooms without tapestries

where phantoms go about their useless tasks.
...

for Clare and Hughie O'Donoghue

Not the crudely sketched
man of sorrows
from the cover-image
of the old school catechism
that was touched
and smudged so much
it lost its mystic fragrance.

And not Gauguin's Yellow Christ
in the Breton countryside,
a Golgotha made strange
by those maids in attendance.
Or Poussin's Redeemer
down from the Cross
under the gaze of the spellbound.

But the Blue Crucifixion
shows a fleshy semblance
of human wreckage that belongs
to a man who was counted
among the transgressors.
Our idea of him electrified
by such mystery as art requires.
...

for Simon



Our second son, the wanderer

has sent a postcard home that shows

the smiling people of Cambodia,

a Buddhist temple, a garden of magnolia.

On travels with his Mappa Mundi

he has stepped into this distant place

as far away as June's long days

are far from January. But he keeps in touch,

emails, texts - our second son, our Gulliver

who sends us words to describe his trek

through the killing fields on a tourist bus.

He calls it another world.

You'd never think there was a war on once,

he says - bombs and bullets, rockets, guns,

the house of love burning,

burning under the Asian sun.
...

It was an evening for the mowing of lawns,
the clipping of hedgerows.
Not staying indoors
with the soap opera, the idiots' quiz
or watching CNN
for news of the next apocalypse.

My companion was sitting in bluejeans,
in the walled garden,
sipping a wine of Burgundy
that was close to a menstrual colour,
enjoying the best weather in weeks,
the indolent heat of an Indian summer.

Her face has always been the iconography
of my best dreams: my gladness,
my rapture, my golden apple.
In the walled garden she was chatting away,
her necklace of pearls,
- the mother-to-daughter heirloom she wears -
as cool as the cool of the day .
...

In the middle of the night her bark was one
that seemed to reach the point of ecstasy.
Fireworks and wind-chimes frightened her,
our little dog who lived through the changes,
devoured chocolate and Pavlova,
loved to lick the honey jar.
Because dog years add up to so many
when she was old we thought she was young
- our terrier with grinding jaw, toothed grin,
who preferred to amble, never run,
whose silent five-word prayer was Give the dog a bone.
She slept with one eye open
to see the small, thin birds of spring
and with masterstrokes of nose and tongue
sought attention, and pawed me when
I was in the middle of a Berryman Dreamsong
of homage and soft remorse
or one of Brodsky's sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots.
...

Among family heirlooms

I find a postcard written on a voyage

to America: the barely legible last goodbye

of a steamship emigrant.



I imagine him, my ancestor

on the journey west: homesick, heartstruck.

Like a fledgling thrown from the nest

to take a chance

under Liberty's raised right hand.



I imagine him, sad to leave his bogbanks,

grassland, the sound of the latch,

but ready to seek with rolled-up sleeves

the better life in Queens, the Bronx,

in streets with their entourage,

streets that spawned hard tasks.
...

The bell above the door tinkled
when I entered, tinkled when I left.
A book in the big window
cast a spell and called me in
to the poets' cradle in the corner.
"So this is poetry", I said
on my journey with the Nightwalker.

And Mandelstam, O Mandelstam,
your spirit moved in that spirit world
too, where there was no sound
except the brush that swept
the wooden floor and pages turning.
And because the natural light
grew dim, there were lights turned on
in the afternoon. I was a novice
Prospero - gone astray,
lost in stanzas and storybook chapters,
there for the solitary pleasure of loitering
where time stood still in the gap
between Machado and Neruda.
...

It is always later than you think,
late in the day, late in history -
too late to keep a diary of carnal pleasures
or be the chronicler of what must be
forgotten and forgiven.

No longer young-as-ever
you are like Narcissus who sees his face and weeps
because of the cracks and creases in it,
the lines of age, the rheumy eyes,
the purple veins no longer hidden.

It is always later than you think.
So late it's late into the season when the years
of the tree are cut down to be
paper for words not written yet,
a cradle or a marriage bed.
...

Playing marbles in the avenue,
I loved their colours rolling on the path,
the spherical motion, the smack
when glass hit glass. We had fistfuls of them,
collections stashed in cloth bags
that we clutched like a treasure chest.
We exchanged and traded them.
Bluebottle blues for bloodshot reds.
It was part of the camaraderie of boys back then.
Kaleidoscopic, polished to the lustre of a gem,
sometimes they'd spill and fall,
pirouetting in all directions, slipping
through the grill and down the rain-shore.
A loss for which there was no consolation.
...