Ciaran O’Driscoll

I'm in love with a lollipop lady
She's the cream she's the lean she's the gravy

Ballistic drivers may holler
From Astras Meganes and Corollas
She's not overawed by their bossing
She's the queen of the zebra crossing

She charges into the rush-hour
Wielding her lollipop-lance
I want to be her Launcelot
But she doesn't even shoot me a glance

She's a queen she's a queen she's a queen
Well you know just what I mean
She's fearless determined and sweet
That Luddite patrolling our street

I'm in love with a lollipop lady
The way she stops traffic is driving me crazy
If she causes a tailback from here to Australia
I'll still be in love with my lollipop lady
...

. . . Mr Bush's appearance today to receive a bowl of shamrock from the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, at the White House . . .

The Irish Times, March 13th 2003
I hold seminars on this sort of thing.
‘Why,' I ask my art students,
‘is there a bunch of bananas beside
the female torso in de Chirico's
The Uncertainty of the Poet?'
And one student says,
‘This is presumably the poet
uncertain how she can eat a banana
without a hand to pick it up,
or a mouth to put it in.'

The problem with Surrealism
is how much more surreal it can get
the more you tease it out,
therefore those art commentators
are wise who remain deadpan:
‘What we see here,' I say,
‘is the unexpected juxtaposition
of a twisted classical female torso
and a bunch of bananas.'

And another student asks:
‘Why are there trains in the background?'

‘De Chirico always has trains in the background.
It's kind of his signature.'

The other problem with Surrealism
is that it's not confined to art.
‘Why,' I ask, ‘is there a big bunch
of shamrock in the Taoiseach's bowl?'
And a promising student says:
‘This is the unexpected juxtaposition
of a bellicose American President
and a bowl of shamrock in the hands
of an abject Irish Prime Minister.
Here the classical and renaissance sense
of calm, balance and harmony
is distorted to make the scene
more sinister and disturbing.'

‘Good, good, very good, excellent!
And why are there planes in the background?'

‘The President always has planes in the background.
It's kind of his signature.'
...

The great auk is an extinct bird
that keeps on laying eggs;
and the more eggs it lays,
the more extinct it becomes.

The eggs, as soon as they are laid,
are put in glass cases in museums,
where egg-reviewers look at them and say:
"This is the best egg yet
from this particular great auk,
we look forward to the next."

All the eggs of all the extinct great auks
in the world are exactly the same shape and size,
pages upon pages of them,
and if you placed them end to end,
they would circle the globe many times,
and there's more coming.

It's not easy to become a great auk:
you must first become extinct
so that the quality of extinction
can be transmitted to the eggs you lay.

Great auks don't speak to other birds,
and since they can't fly
they have founded a Great Auk Society
to declare flying unfashionable,

and all other birds that wish to become great auks
must consent to have their wings clipped
by the Great Auk Society,
and meditate, night and day,
on the virtue of great-aukness.

Eventually, they'll lay
eggs of the correct shape and size,
scarcely noticing that in the process
they have become extinct.
...

I am a man in a black bowler hat,
showing my back to the world.
If I turn, an apple blocks my face.

My first glimpse of art was in a churchyard,
so close it is to death.
I listened to the silence of that place.

Sometimes, laid out, she elevates behind me
as I walk the towpath.
Stiff-necked, I do not look around.

My art has no laws of gravity,
but a woman's chestnut hair falls to the ground
and bowler-hatted men are falling rain.

I have seen boulders floating in the sky,
and every day a cloud comes in my door.
Baguettes, instead of clouds, go drifting by.

In woods, between the horse's head and rider,
a vista slips, slim as the trunk of a tree.
What's visible hides what's also visible.

The sea is one with what is not the sea.
...

(copperwork figure in a pub, Co. Galway)
The entry wound is under the right elbow - here.
And as you can see
the neck of the fiddle has struck the heart. In fact
almost the whole fiddle has entered the body.
Only the head and feet remain intact.

Each arm, each leg, is fifteen fragments;
the trunk an archipelago, a jigsaw
presided over by the moonstruck face.

A relic of geansaí adheres to the neck;
lapels of a vanished coat. A straw hat
crowns this extraordinary apparition.
It fidgets forward in fine copper boots,
its own backbone for walking stick.

A king of shreds and patches, gentlemen,
held together by no thread of consequence.
Note how the fixed grin belies
the fact that the night sky floats through the wounds.
...