Mary O’Donoghue Poems

after John Storrs' sculpture (1922)
She is sealed like a bomb in her anorak.
Her face is flushed fruit under the hood.
She's already moving away. I want to call her back.

At nine in the morning the sky is blue-black.
I think of hard falls, split lips, her blood.
But she's sealed like a bomb in her anorak,

and shouting to friends on the tarmac,
a yardful of children, a tide, a flood
already moving away. I want to call her back,

I'm faint, suddenly starved with the lack
of her, and determined that she should
know, all sealed like a bomb in her anorak.

Grip the wheel. Radio on. The yakety-yak
of today's talking heads on How to Be Good.
The morning is moving away. I want to call her back.

This is what it's like to be left slack,
the cord frayed like I knew it would.
She is sealed like a bomb in her anorak,
already moved away, and I can't call her back.
...

She has been asleep for three days,
a liquid length of time

closed over her head like a sheet
of lake-water. They think they have

her dreams cached away
in their clutterbook of explanans,

and see no flicker hint from behind
eyelids fern-stitched with blue veins.

But she is navigating equations,
pointed fir jungles of isosceles

triangles, the screams of chalk
and nails like seagull voice, dust

of chalk a scurf on her cuffs.
She walks past the bossy sign-posts

of sine and tan, and her map begins
to make sense, when the two-legged

travel stool of pi is pulled from under
her and she is splashed awake. She leaves

infinity, her last mark, a slender eight
sleeping with its face to the wall.
...

The nurse looks away from the patient
whose back is arced in a swoon,
a skin-and-bone parabola.

She rolls her eyes to their corners
as if to say: I'm fed up with this
light-dark, fall-catch charade,

I'm sick of bracing my knees
in wait for the sudden drop
of their weight, I'm sick

of the smell of their black-outs,
sweat on serge or wool, sour
as ammonia. Their impromptu

urine, warmly worming down
my own skirt and over my shoes.
And I don't believe them anyhow.

Her hands are clasped against the patient's
ribs, thick washer-woman's fingers,
latticed like skin-and-bone basketwork.

She does not understand his modus
operandi, and why these women
faint away when the light is quenched

like a match disappeared into
a mouth. She lets their heads
loll back, inept new mother.

She holds her pose, a tedious pietà,
in the dark. She hears the glass of photo
plates slide like swords into a magician's box.
...

Dolls 'tached. Sindy, Jana drowned. Six and seven.
Cat flat dead on a Massey. Burials. July's hot smother.
A pony trucked away. Playing didgeridoo through wavin.
Eight and nine, Two Tribes, war. A friend's older brothers,
always plotting their murders. Hazel woods. The lake.
Nettles dock-leaved. Calamine. Electric fence susurrus.
Seven Seas gloop on a spoon. Gypsum. Buck rake.
Ten. Statues crying blood. Liking the word brucellosis.
Jeyes' Fluid puke-thud on tiles. Talk about the feeks.
Eleven. Rhombus desk. Feet in the stove. Poodle socks.
MT-USA. Walking like an Egyptian. Padre Pio's mitten.
Supergran, Falcon Crest. Twelve. Ganders' wicked beaks.
Horse jumps. Chopped fingers sent from the Border Fox.
The telltale heart. The half-blind dog. Being bitten.
...