Gregory O'Donoghue Poems

Always you surprise me but never more
than when you announced "Your number is nine."
I've read enough to know this is so,
allow myself superstitious pride in it -
three times three, magical mystical number.
Nines are rare and I was only guessing
in answering "It takes one to know one."
You smiled, I smiled: two nines are eighteen;
in numerology, that is nine.
You went on "Your colours are grey and black -
you know, silvery grey with dark bits
like a feather shed by a pigeon."
I know the colours of the moon -
white, red, and black - but not my own,
perhaps they alter with moods and seasons.
Always easier to spy
colours of others - yours: silver and black…
Our days nearing their end, alone I wander
streets around the bulbous golden
onion domes of Alexandra Nevsky
searching for the right gift - find a bracelet
of silver with studs of black onyx:
silver for you are silver-tongued,
black for the storm of your dusky curls
and eyes the bluish black of ripe olives.
The jeweller, looking at me askance,
goes with my wishes: removes the tenth stud.
...

sherpa
- the cat - has a
half-moon on her neck.

has two
moons in her full eyes: yellowed pages,
i think some secrets

only the middle ages
could have dreamed the demons lodged there.
when she

sneaks around my study
all the wallpictures turn their eyes,

the table shudders when her half-moon steals from
my water-colour of the courtesan

to the woman bathing.
...

The first pigeons I remember rustled
inside baskets at a seaside station
where someone told us the way-out
scenario of their release and homing.

Before I learned the ring-, the turtle-dove
are pigeons, I guessed by the bill,
the high eye in the mild skull,
the Holy Ghost was an albino pigeon.

Years on, as freak April snow
curled into another station,
a porter filled me in on pigeons:
when they circle above the east platform

a widow will board the next train;
if over the northside shed,
misery will alight from the dawn express;
so on - but only when the snow has fallen.

*

It all came back as I focused on the spray
of thrashing feathers, colour-flutters,
the rush of tumbling heads in ‘Fantail Pigeons'.

Where only one foot emerges (sfumato)
and the shapings of one whole torso - a dash
of dark and carmine at its breast.

And the heads - there are two or three, five:
a pigeon lit upon hanging on thermals,
or lofting, or wheeling; its radiance held.
...

Midnight. Only myself and a white-haired woman
have been set down at a dismantled rural station.
I watch her cross the tracks and fade
up a slope, vanish in a blur of conifers.

Lingering near the solitary building -
abandoned sandstone that tells me to move on,
that here is nowhere, that I'm travelling -
I listen, savouring the night stillness.

It is the aftertraces of flaring spirits
who've leapt after diminishing carriages,
it must be these making the quietness quicken.

And I'm numbed a moment at seeming to see
the snow-haired woman returning; it's only
a chalky cat stealing in a crouch across
the moonlight, unless I am doubly mistaken.
...

We pass
(no shebeen this) Ireland's
oldest licensed premises,

barely glance
at the plaque that says
Dukes of Wellington

and Marlborough drank here.
We are going to stand upon
the northeast limb of a star.

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley,
never was at ease
with his Irish nativity:

"Of course,
sir to be born in a stable
does not make one a horse."

We stroll a rock solid star
that might have grown from the ground;
our gazes for each other

yet also over the parapet
at Shandon; the summits
of the river valley; the sun-warmed limestone.

Your arm crooked through the elbow
is where we stand
however ambiguously we feel

about this fort,
its antennae in five directions
we'd not want

to lurch along Barrack Street
singing tribal songs of a Saturday night -
beamed in and thumbed,

our signatures
to our confessions
written with fishbones.

Arthur Wellesley
was not a cut of beef in a boot,
nor was he a horse,

nor - born in a stable - the Christ.
We'll come down off this planet.
Have a squeeze and slow kiss first.
...