Leanne O’Sullivan

At dawn, I lie on my side, beside him,
feel his fingers stir on me again like blessing,
then he lifts himself up, leaning on his elbow
with his mouth so close, over mine.
My legs stretch toward the bottom
of the bed, like the first, curved line
of daylight unfolding from its kernel into air.

I have forgotten the last time, this close,
I lay under a stranger's skin and felt it worm
through me. My eyes closed then.
I wept into the glare of the sealed lid.
I see my body frozen on that ground,
the bare soul in its mouth
as if it was hauled out, half-dead.

Now, mornings open with his voice.
My love stretches his legs and turns over
onto his side to face me. I see the goodness
of his hands as he moves his palm
over and over and over my body,
as if he was wiping clean, undoing,
redoing, seaming the sore with his quietness.

Soon the birds and daisies will come.
Last night, I had felt him bring my soul
forward with love cries and a hush of kisses.
I had stayed awake all night after,
my flesh suckling the naked touch of his,
feeling the sweet, steady breath on my eyes,
until he woke, and moved,

and lifted himself over me,
like the white light of morning gently arching,
nudging my pale skin to pink.
His mouth suddenly comes down
through the bright, blissful amnesias.
My hands are softer than what they were.
Body of this woman, he is making you for love.
...

In among these wet, melon skins
I sit with my back to the bar,

cross-legged, smiling my red mouth.
I've painted myself black and leather.

My eyes move quickly, circling
the high, loud limbs of the night.

In the centre of the dance floor
a lioness shrieks in her own bath.

Like red pearls, dry lips pucker
to the eager glass. I drink and blaze.

An animal going mad for the garland
of a woman rolls over to the end

of the bar like a devil's tongue, red
and greasy, stoned on his own poison

and licking his lips. A man in love
spreads a flock of fingers on my thigh.

I undo them until he hates me
and raise a finger to his back.

The room is flooding, people float
as if on water and music. I stumble

onto my heels and drown with a wrong boy
while the moon turns onto her white belly

and is fed secrets by crippled mouths;
a boyfriend passed out, a glass shattered,

a woman tasted, a child coming to seed
with her legs wrapped around a man,

the night moistening the darkness
with its many breaths.
...

I can never find a pen when you come,
when you snap me up on your lizard tongue
and wrap yourself around me as if I was a spool.
Vague as metaphors you tease, trawling
your shadows as feathering clouds do,
shedding infant vowels in your vaporous image.
You will never be perfected, and while
you are half- born I will never sleep.

In pickling ink I preserve all your fruits;
Perhaps you are a prophecy,
a mouthing of the boundless, or some
God or other Minerva festering
like secrets in empty lines.
Years gone now, labouring to drain
the reddest blood from your throat,
and I am none the wiser.
...

This blank paper is the one good thing.
I want to fill it with colour, soundlessness
like a heart that shuts with slow murmurings.
I feel myself slipping into that whiteness.
My dumb legs, my red hair pale by moonlight
as I doze into a laudanum pod,
secretly happy, blooming in the night
though the cold surrounds my bed.

This is the woman as God has created her,
this is the woman I am outdoing.
She is a ghost the more I see her.
Her eyes dry against my breath. She is moving
from me into this true radiance while
I stare. I don't move, the heart stops its flood
of rust and the mirror crackles to sand.
My babe, the brush is slipping from my hand.
...

I want to stay with you tonight, as light unhusks
and spills slowly from the half-moon,
where I am lying curved beside you in the dark.

I know you by touch, our bodies finding the other,
kiss by kiss, like birds flying in pattern, a tiny shape of God -
breast to breast and legs intertwined.

Your flesh glitters, shadowless, round droplets
rising in dew. I cannot be near enough.
I remember the first night our skins were this close,

after a day of rain, a bridge shining behind you
in the blind wilderness. I heard the crunch
of leaves under my boots, the distant heartbreak

of a bird's small cry as I moved closer to you,
one half of a creature midwived out of the dark,
trails of goose-pimples along my skin.

Months later I think of it, leaning against you,
as if on the lip of a boat, and the clouds
unloosing their nets until the full rain came again,

moving everything in one direction, tremendous as a cell
and brushing against the whole nerve of my body,
in the dew hours, your lips on my forehead.
...

walking to the hospital


How the autumn dawn burned through
the misty broods and settled down in fire;

how quickly the sun glittered my shadow,
how my shadow cried, a moment, with joy.

A light frost, a vision of light crackling
down the maples, down the tinder ash.

I was the good thief. I held my Love's
sweet breath, his beautiful, intelligent gaze.

I closed my eyes and he woke inside me.
When I saw, he saw the inflamed world.

A bird sang deeply from the gutter eaves.
When I closed my eyes I was elsewhere.

I walked through the fire of his sleep.


leaving early


My Love,
tonight Fionnuala is your nurse.
You'll hear her voice sing-song around the ward
lifting a wing at the shore of your darkness.
I heard that, in another life, she too journeyed
through a storm, a kind of curse, with the ocean
rising darkly around her, fierce with cold,
and no resting place, only the frozen
rocks that tore her feet, the light on her shoulders.

And no cure there but to wait it out.
If, while I'm gone, your fever comes down—
if the small, salt-laden shapes of her song
appear as a first glimmer of earth-light,
follow the sweet, hopeful voice of that landing.
She will keep you safe beneath her wing.


in your sleep


After "The Lark Ascending" by Ralph Vaughan Williams


The moment the lark finally vanishes
into the spread green sky of the forest
is the moment you suddenly lift

your bruised arm up, over your body,
as though to show me the wing's eclipse,
or the wing, or the season of your dream.

And even as your hand lapses silent
onto your chest, and your breath goes
sluggish, I am already watching your feet

prepare their slow first step under the sheet
as the last notes of sunlight fall quiet,
and you do not move again. My love,

are you a bird reviving in a summer field?
Was it the lark ascending that you heard,
a ghost among its shy-hearted tunes?

Yes. I heard the lark escaping, too.
...