The Annexe 3 viii 26
Michael Dooley
COSHMA AUBADE
Och, ochón is breoite mise… Ó seoladh mé chun uaignis’
—Aindrias Mac Cráith
Still these weeks of low sun and morning gutters
warbling for bungalows expectant of birdsong;
there are crows loyal to old estates who climb
the sky like black pepper falling upwards.
In wind-troubled hedges, wrens tight as fists
are sure this is dreaming. Cats ascend like Perilaus
the hot tick of car engines, and on dark kitchen tables
notes await, tensed with the patience of a gunman.
Do you remember? How at school they told us
water always found its level, gave us beakers
and funnels to straighten the stream like a pulled rope.
I think of it often now: refracted figures bending
in glass, faces blue as pups’ eyes. How something
in me had thought to say I can see you—but didn’t.
eILÉAN nI cHUILLEANÁIN
EN TROMPE-L’OEIL
She scans the frame, tall and broad,
smooth like a titlepage, on which appear,
en trompe-l’oeil, flittered receipts
and curling photographs. Various shadows
shaped like butcher’s hooks are loaded with doctors’ bills,
trinkets from old encounters. Emblems, writs, an alias.
A crowded surface, but a bare patch holds
a sketch map of the city, marked with arrows
that skirt the open squares to indicate
a tight fistful of meeting places –
she can’t deny she knew them all in her day.
This is all in her mind. She stares as if she could see it,
asking: is this my life? Then, closing her eyes,
What do I do now? But when she looks again
she sees how the wisteria, its tumbled bunches
suddenly purple across the courtyard, how they
cancel the passage of time, swallow it up in here,
and this evening it does not matter where here is.
Intensity of presence: as when Susannah Cibber
in her deep contralto, in the words of Isaiah,
announced for the first time He was despised,
and nobody denied her right to face them,
still to be heard, in the grip of her own troubles –
she was inside the word that grew
from its deep root in grammar until
it was changed, suddenly filled
with meaning from a new source.
And the musicians consorted, the pages of their scores
too many to think of all at once, fluttering in unison.
The map of the city showed the great crossroads.
On the cobbles outside the riffraff paused to savour
the big swell of silence after the final echo.
killian O'Donnell
MIGRATIONS The five married sisters took a house in Crosshaven
with their children, maids and nannies
for the month of July
and the men slipped down at weekends
from their important business
to pick at gritty sandwiches and play
gin and drink whiskey late into the night
and were gone by Monday
with their hangovers, and these
migrations carried on well into the 60’s—
or so I was told, because I remember
none of it — except for the day
when I looked up and saw
a great crowd of bathers running down to the sea
pointing and shouting — Look! Look! Whales! Whales!
— and I looked
and I looked but I couldn’t see anything
through that forest of burned legs blocking the horizon,
and if I close my eyes, I can see it now.
MARY TURLEY-MCGRth
ESCAPE
Maybe he preferred the solitude of the haggard
and the breathing of beasts to the commotion
of a family kitchen, or was it something different?
A fall-back to the risks of youth when he escaped
the wrath of Black and Tans, having headbutted
one of them who had asked yet again, grabbing
him by jacket lapels, what’s yer name, mate?
My father smelt the drink on his breath, heard
the rattle of teeth as he staggered backwards,
then ran for his life as others leapt off the lorry.
Ditch shadows hid him, dodging up along through
neighbouring fields and fences towards the town.
Later on, my grandmother heard soldiers searching
in the cowshed. She huddled by the hearth without
lighting the lamp until they left. They did not touch
the door. When my father returned after midnight
she lit a lamp, kept it very low, listening to his story.