Thomas McCarthy

Here on the writing desk of the earth
The sun goes down quickly at ink level.
Soon the stony outcrop will be a blob
Of light blue and the sky will be pale
...

The land is not yet half settled
After our years of pandemonium:
This time it is almost too late
To sing with full heart a parting hymn,
...

Poetry is the cuckoo that sits upon expectant life
While God is absent. Something vague and distant
From a far field, the cuckoo pleases all of us
Without eggs to incubate. But if you want the grief
...

My hatred of bicycles has no end to it.
I should see someone on four wheels about this.

A cyclist would never smoke expensive cigars,
The ones rolled secretly by a Cuban exile in LA,
...

Our kitten turns to deliver its encomium,
Purring as if a lump of tabby quartz
Propelled it so. It shares this petrichor
With the last bumblebees seeking glamour.
...

They told me to draw a memorable door
But I had to ask them what that was for
When no one would be left in this particular
Drawing office or its marble corridor.
...

When I contemplate your magic gifts tonight,
alone, the back-boiler creaking, the frosty moonlight,
I am reminded that you were Leonardo
reincarnate, the Cuchulain of canvas.
...

It breaks my heart to think of your failures,
for you were not a bad man, just hopeless.
The lost Party, those lethal social forces
that broke your will broke others less poor.
...

for Catherine


You keep returning to the sea as if you`d lost a bracelet
In the water, or some such valuable and peaceful thing.
It is part of the problem of being a girl, my mother
...

I watch the timeless candle burning at both ends.
At one end it must be my mother's face
And her infinite correlation with my own fate.
There's no other end that I would put in place
...

These brown discolorations on a faded black-
and-white photograph are not at all like a defect
In anything remembered but, rather, a kind of
"Crystallization" as Stendhal described it, in
...

A different nation lives within our walls, cats.
Sent from God in triplicate, easy as envoys
Of a great power, my wife's cats enjoy the sun
As it fills each evening the bristling chaise longue.
...

You turn away from me in the fragrant heat
Of this Montenotte summer -
You are besieged with the bustle of parenthood,
More fatally besieged than I could ever be.
...

Parnell will never come again, he said. He's there, all that was mortal of him.
Peace to his ashes.
James Joyce, Ulysses
...

I. HOLE, SNOW

It is an image of irreversible loss,
This hole in my father's grave that needs
Continuous filling. Monthly now, my
...

Chocolate-coloured paint and the July sun
like a blow-torch peeling off
the last efforts of love:
more than time has abandoned this,
...

For you I would have built a herb-garden,
Not a pathetic patch for mint and chives

But a real olitory, with old-
...

At La Roque the swallows called, whirling round
the house, their tight marine cries piercing air
like words cut into black marble. I remember
...

Morning traffic makes excuses at every changing light.
Now the whole world is jealous of Shanghai, humming
And hawing, purring and growling. One heart beats faster
As it runs the red, a double-decker bus screams with rage:
...

Poetry that has never built its aircraft carrier leaves all power at home.
The pen wears an apron as it feeds the world. It ladles all the comfort
From its pot but lacks all transport. It calls down such heavy irony upon the desert,
It pleads for faraway grief and grief's gasping children. A poem takes
...