Mary O'Malley Biography

I wasn't always like this. I learned
composure the hard way. These were not colours
I ever wore until he dressed me. I favour drabs.

It's not likeness, more my mother or a sister.
He's elongated my face. He painted me before,
tense sharp lines, my face cut like a jewel

Into a hard triangle, an unsettled dazzle of indigo,
vermilion. When he uncovered the canvas I felt
like the time I caught myself in the mirror

and it was her face. The odd thing is they never met.
It's in the bones, he said, like disease.
We are each other's home now, and held me all night.

There are worse lives. He calls me the companion
of his soul. Of course he cheats with models
but one of the consolations of age is a solid marriage.

He traces the notch below my throat with his thumb.
He says it is an almost perfect V. Though
I know it isn't, something stirs between my hips still.

When he paints me I see a smudge there like a bruise,
as if he wants to make his mark, a ruck
against artifice. He leaves the background dark
for our secrets. I love him well enough. He stays.
...

In the blue light that let us see
my husband's shirt buttons on bonfire night
and see our mink-coated dog
in the distance at half eleven at night,
a butterfly wings in from Borneo. It is the colour
of luminous blue fish in an aquarium.

It drinks our attention until the lavender hills,
the silver hound leaping for a tennis ball,
the girl throwing it, sixteen and beautiful,
become a film, a vacuumed surface.
We watch this creature visiting from space,
from heaven, from somewhere else, transfixed.

Go back, I want to say, You are in the wrong place.
It hovers for a while, pulsing blue light,
then flies off towards the coast.
We stare, robbed of a dimension. I am afraid.
I asked God what sacrifice would be enough
to keep us all together. I am talking with a stranger.

Naturalists write neater poems than lovers.
I would have promised anything.
All I observed beside the fire blossoming
below the house was a brown O on each wing.
I could taste the shining bone that would remain
a charred promise in the morning ashes.
...

Fluent gesture. Already on the Beauvais bus a man
strokes his son's head with a palm cupped.
The child's black hair responds like a young cat.

A boy is sulking beautifully,
legs crossed at the ankles. The girl
ignoring him is reading Kafka - La Procès.
He utters soft plosives, little plumes of indignation
astonished at her cruelty for at least ten kilometres.
When they make up, she rubs the side of his face
With slow fingers for another five before he defrosts.

There are banks of hawthorn along the motorway.
By Paris, the lovers are reconciled. Outside
open-pored sandstone drinks in the south.
I think of Blaithin, her skin made of flowers,
the touch of sun opening them.
...

He is waiting by the door, two wine glasses
placed on the timber cask. Compact.
He doesn't take a single sip: it is hot.
Tiny droplets mist both glasses.

When she breezes in he touches her face
with joy, her body arches back, leans
into him. With a small camera he snaps
her cheek, her smile, her eyes in close-up.

Now they sip the rough wine. His hand slides
down her side and lightly squeezes her hip.
This will be a slow devouring. You wish them luck
and afterwards, as well as can be expected.

In a café in Lisbon before love had broken camp -
your glasses left wet rings on the wood -
his hand on your hip, like them - snap. These streets -
click - saw resistance in the war, were rebuilt.

The café buzzes. You sit on a plastic chair
alone with your twist of flowers.
They gather their frivolous purchases.
Outside, the hot concrete stretches for hours.
...

The body does not long to be unencumbered.
The arm wants a child to hold away
from the boiling pot. I miss it: their fury
strident as junior paramilitaries,
their extravagant grievances, their bottomless sleep.
Mostly I miss their small bodies,
sweet as summer ices, as berries.

We can be parted from the sea and live.
It is like overcoming a stammer, or a tick.
By daily teaching the body new habits,
planets are persuaded out of orbit.

In seconds it is all undone. Holding Rosa
in a Dublin hotel is going to sleep
in a house on the shore and waking up
to the same sound. The magnetic dock
of child to hip, earth to moon, time stolen.
...