Calle del Pureza, Cadiz

Get Me A Hat!

Monet, Impressions: Sunrise (Le Havre Harbour, 1872)

Cows in a Corofin Field (County Clare)

Man from Johannesburg, Woman from Portadown

No Shots of Inis Mor

 

 

Calle del Pureza, Cadiz

Leather eye
head of lace
lean out
hand of bone
cups weather
street end
right left
chirr of bike
left right
rogue taxi
horn cheek
horn mouthful
balcony
hydrangea
wrestles breeze
palm languor
laps iron
ball bounce
step left
goal block
step right
hands high
grapple wire
vest and bra
prance indoors
tissue wrap
of doll senora
tacks down chasm
mist of dreams
mudguard right
heel reversing
second thoughts
rattle back
rain start
street corner
slab and cobble
tyre spin
balloon sound
choke and squeeze
kerb sound
lousy angle
rain hard
lights on
shutter barking
wire throttled
soused bandana
flying home

(Calle-street)

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Get Me A Hat!

The Saturday city was bursting with scores
of shoppers and bustlers. The fishmongers' roars
looped the loop through the air like a springy-pawed cat.
Then a voice wailed, 'Make way! I'm in need of a hat!'

Down precincts and alleys T Rex thumped along,
ignoring the crowds and the buskers' bright song.
Through a speckle-glass doorway he fell with a splat!
'My wedding's at three!' he cried. 'Get me a hat!'

Assistants screamed, fainted or quivered with shock
as T Rex swooshed his tail round the headgear in stock,
but the manager bold in a scarlet cravat
whispered, 'Calm yourself, sir, we shall choose you a hat.'

T Rex tried on stetsons and busbies and caps
and black Russian efforts with gynormous flaps
and toppers and bowlers and mortar-boards flat:
'I cannot be wed,' he sobbed, 'minus a hat!'

A deerstalker perched on his bony-domed head,
then trilbies and toques in gold, sable and red.
He gave a straw helmet a curious pat:
'Would the vicar,' he wondered, 'object to this hat?'

The manager watched with a growing despair
as unsuitable titfers flew off through the air--
then he looked at his feet and considered the mat
underneath: 'Half a mo,' he said, 'here is your hat!'

To the back room he took it. For ten minutes straight
came tearing and tapping and lastly a great
big 'Eureka!' He came back in triumph. 'Now that,'
he cried, twirling it round, 'is your wedding-day hat!'

It had Chinese pagodas and summer-tree tails
that would flutter like dreams down T Rex's grand scales,
and a brim like the wings of a sky-sailing bat:
'Your bride will be boggled! Go forth in your hat!'

The shoppers applauded, each busker sang shrill.
From pub to cathedral, from river to hill
rang cheers, whoops and blessings, a joyous Howzat!
for the wedding of weddings--T Rex--and the hat!

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Monet, Impressions: Sunrise
(Le Havre Harbour, 1872)

A laden sun
boils wax
above docks
and crating-yards
just pulling
the flesh of day
over smoky bone.
The sun
winkles deep
into boat-worried,
crane-dressed waters,
which become
a crescent of bright grief:
orange tears mass
and skitter, burning off
the sleep of the waves,
urging them apart and on
to find their tide,
catch fast to its gather.
One tear is a swordfish
that shoots the snub hull
of a pilot-boat
in which a figure
half-paddles, half-hangs
off kinked weariness,
and another sits
like a mysterious stranger
who has paid well to be ferried
to the moon of exile,
has looked his incredulous last
on the works of tears and fire.

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Cows in a Corofin Field (County Clare)

And so they stand,
heads up, spines bevelled.
They face their own
intimate ways,
as though each jaw
stripped and cudded
the green of a compass-point.
Clouds bag down low
about their shanks--
swatches of restless water
to shammy off
the ticks and shit
and meadow-smears
of another week
misted in dreams.

Suddenly
they wheel around,
as at a single click
up or down
in the humour of the air;
lock into the path
of a leader
who pioneers her way
to the edge of their world,
the cut of her legs
like a horse in show,
her tail a self-maddening crop.

Perhaps she has scented
a hogsback of grass
that hunkered itself
in the long caprices of summer.
Or autumn has her already
by the nose
and draws her on
to its wilds of perpetual half-light,
where shelter
is the pitch of undefending struts
in a matchstick universe,
where Novembers capitulate
in javelins of rain
on shaken eaves.

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Man from Johannesburg, Woman from Portadown

I am a white from Johannesburg.
History throws its boots
into the corner of my voice,
spills apart the vents of its tunic,
presenting its arse
to a fire of hair and fingernails;
my speech
is the alternate thuck and ping
of its gobfroth in a spittoon,
its buttons discharged
from a belly of equatorial girth.

I married a woman from Portadown.
Her voice is bullets:
her solace for this one’s bones in their twilight,
her enquiry after that one’s kid,
flashes holes across brocade and anaglypta
like the scamper of blooded feet
in overnight snow.

So we keep to ourselves,
live moments
others have just vacated,
twine in shadow
till some stranger’s hurry
echoes from the street.
We mean no harm,
would gladly dip our wing
at the soft disturbances
of chance joke or blether;
but are enfeoffed
to the monsters undying on our tongues--
re-breathing dawn assaults
in our murmurs,
taking the mere seconds of a yawn
to winch cargoes of stopped mortality
up the arm of a streetlamp,
leaving any time of sun or moon as chooses stanza continues
to prink the kirtles of tar,
the gouts of feather.

Safer to make love with rags in our mouths.
Safest to cry in silence.

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No Shots of Inis Mor

Uncaptured, then,
the early ferry
leeching its hull tyres
on the ratnooks of the quay

the drag and stumble
of the gangway
as all of Turin and Idaho
and Charentes
fling their limbs at land

the jarvey
hawking island jaunts
in tones of a moonlight
assassin

two blonde tweenies
from Hanover
pasting seven bells
from a taxi’s last hubcap

a mutton-fleshed shopwoman
cuffing a man from Siena
who’s replaced an Aran lovespoon
upside-down

a geezer with lungs
of Rockall phlegm
terrorising a strewn boreen
with ‘Danny Boy’
from under a beach umbrella

Arlene from Poughkeepsie
fluttering a happy hand
at eighty pounds
for a sweater with a nicked thread
secret and unfurling in one arm

a waitress loosing
a hundred thousand welcomes
like doves upon a shadow
uncertain at the door. Her dog, it turns out

Man of Aran: battler, fisher, farmer,
pendant, sport-spray and candy-shape

the storm of legs
urging hire-bikes out of Kilronan,
till every last ruin,
from kelping-station
to the fastness of Four Comely Saints,
gathers its brickwork
and sings the slipping of gears.

Uncaptured also
the god from Burgundy,
tanned and deaf-mute,
denims aflap at western An Grioir:
soothing the ache
of waves that were canyon swells
off the Grand Banks--
his elbows winged,
fingers pattering mouth

and above him
a mule chinning a hack of stone
in a field clamped on the world’s end--
where angels might brace on a pin
while the first darkness
thrashes and spumes below,
teaching them their dance.

(forthcoming in Links, 2002)

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