Culture Night Reading

Lisa, Moya and I will be reading in Spiddal Library as part of  Culture Night. It's at 7.00pm the perfect time between other events so why not come along; it would be great to see you there.

A taste of my forthcoming collection Hellkite

From Frost Heave:

                                          Photo: Genevieve Hystad

He followed all her actions on Facebook. The whole world knew about her white-water rafting and the cycling, as well as driving her truck into great hills of snow. She was smiling out at him, holding up a snow rake that had precipitated a roof avalanche on top of her. Covered in white and laughing. He could imagine the snow that found its way down behind her scarf, melting as it touched the heat of her neck. She was pontificating about frost heaves as if she had never heard of potholes. She hadn’t realised, until she was where other people were, that this was where she wanted to be, she told anyone and everyone who bothered to read what she wrote.

Sounds wonderful, Gretta.

Wish I could be you, Gretta.

           That’s some man you’ve got there, Girl.

He could see her in the General Store, with its good old-fashioned charm. She was one of ‘the communidy’ now. The t softened to d, letting go of her own tongue to suck on someone else’s. Boars-head meat beside favourite frozen novelties. Walking in, being greeted by Barbara behind the counter. How rage boiled up in him. Lee Saoul playing her guitar over the soft rustle of newspapers as people turned them over and filled their coffee cups again, called out to her. A pan in the kitchen being scraped and potatoes mashed while she bought pastrami on rye, linguica, corned beef hash for her Tom. At least he wasn’t called Bud. Bud would have killed him entirely. That name opening up to her petal by petal. Sitting in the front yard on a love seat, a fucking loveseat with his square jaw and his hair streaked back, a cold beer, full-fitting jeans; blue jays in the trees.

She posted up pictures of their sugar house. Night temperatures cold enough to send the sap rushing back down the bole of the tree, followed by a warm day that drew it right up again. The two of them in their big, red ass pick-up as they drove out to the sugar bush, striking it while the sap was running, boring into the trees, the spigot drip, drip into the pail, bucket, whatever she called it now. All day and night the stove fed with kindling as they boiled off the water, reducing it all to sweetness. Bleeding sweetness out of the sugar bush as if she were born to it. Drinking in all its sickening sap.

Could she not have waited for his sugar time, good old promises between her lips, instead of packing up and taking the bus to the airport, fuck-friend waiting for her at the other end with his Shiloh Sharps.

Intruder

                                          Photo: courtesy of Peter Moore

Intruder

The night the heat drove you to take

your bed out onto the balcony

when the wind came in off the sea

roughing the leaves of the tamarinds,

I didn’t follow.

Separate we slept with nothing to soften

the insistence of cars on the street,

and separate we woke to the sound

of the sun coming up over the lagoon.

A sparrow had come in the night

and settled as close as possible,

in the crumple of sheet beside you

as if she couldn’t bear to be without you.

I watched you both

the pulse in your neck now easy,

your arm nesting her,

head tucked into her breast, plump with sleep.

Sensing my breath in the air

she opened her wings and flew from you,

leaving behind some soft imagining of herself

curved and pale.

From Toil the Dark Harvest, Bradshaw Books, 2004

The Centre Cannot Hold

All night the wind has fought with our cottage.

It wakes and unsettles a part of me

that is unsettled by such noise

as it is by all  the colours of grey

we must live with throughout these summer days.

But your country has weather big enough for both of us.

It tumbles an outermost house into the sea

to careen  on a  stranger beach in Chatham,

or a tornado whips up Dorothy into another state.

Hurricanes with names benign as dimpled grand-aunts

come to tea and scones

but leave you stranded in their wake,

flood you with their grief.

A man once told me about the wind in Oklahoma.

It flung their screen door into Saul Weller’s garden,

whipped one blade of straw from the barn

and drilled it right through the glass

of  their kitchen window.

It held there, needle-straight, the pane intact,

lights blown, food in the icebox melting.

Before its contents folded onto the floor

they were allowed eat all at once;

pistachio, dark chocolate, black cherry,

while the straw lodged tight in its place,

breaking their mother’s back.

Our lives are built on vagaries of weather, 

one well-aimed gust and the sandbars

of memory crumble at our feet.

Assessing the Bird House for Property Tax

The Power of Poets

Ancient poets were mighty with their verse.

A house infested called the scribe to come

and rhyme away all rats, the nation’s curse.

Rats just had to hear the pen traverse

the lines of metaphor on soft vellum

and fear the poet who’d slay them with his verse.

Before the ink was dry, rodents or worse

were gone, young and old banished from that home

by rhymes too powerful for them to curse.

Times have come again for poets to coerce

those vermin who have cost this land some

pain, to show us all the power of their verse.

Bring those to shame who bled the fiscal purse

with biros blazing reverse this bleak outcome,

write lines too powerful for them to curse.

Rise up slammers, rhymers, long or terse,

become what you always wanted to become.

Ancient poets had power with their verse

now rhyme away these rats, the nation’s curse.

Writing out the Storm

     

This is early morning light. I sit at my table recording those first thoughts that spring from the chink of knowing between sleep and wake. The sky is a brooding indigo, augury of the shower coming across the hills, so big it will deluge us in no time. The wind begins to rise and I watch the shower as it moves in to attack. It beats off the glass as if trying to get in, so loud its heavy thud is bound to wake my sleeping family as it rages overhead.

I look out to the left and right and front of me. There are strings of water beads falling to earth, on  the long grass where the wind rushes the wintering of things, My cat comes  running down the field, a tortoiseshell roll in a  field of dying grass, finds the one cloche with an easy access and hides there from the demon overhead. The wind battles the naked branches of the rowans, the dried-out umbels of angelica. The clouds shift to pour down over the stone fort on the hill.

All signs indicate we are in for a bad day; but slowly the slowly begins to lighten from its indigo to something resembling blue and the storm clouds move off into the other villages, away over the Corrib to beat upon the islands of the lake. As the sky brightens, the house begins to purr like a giant cat being stroked by the hand of God. I have written the storm out.

A Home Coming

                              

I have been thinking a lot these dark days about the wolf that played puck with the three little pigs. How, in a few breathy huffs, he razed to the ground their ecologically-sound straw house, their sustainable wooden one, before he met his lupine demise in a boiling pot on the fire. However cautionary a tale this is meant to be, it didn’t deter my family from making a life-changing decision to move back to Galway in the late 90s and build a timber home.  It was built in a factory in Sweden and delivered to us on the back of a lorry on the winter solstice. It was pre-fairytale Tiger time, and in the long light of the previous summer the children and I settled into a small cottage close to our chosen site. We decided that my husband would remain in Dublin for the time being as he was the designated bringer home of the bacon.

 So I supervised all the ground work. PJ, the digger-man, ‘a tasty worker’ by all accounts, broke the earth with the metal claw of his machine and soon the foundations were taking shape. A woman out standing in her own field, I worked with my two loyal neighbours to get the water pipes in place, organise conduit for the electricity cables, oversee installation of the septic tank, the incessant rain seeping through every stitch of clothing while my beloved sat in a cosy office in Dublin, his back to the radiator. 

                        News soon spread throughout the village that it was to be delivered on the shortest day of the year. Another fairy tale: how could a real house be built on such a light-starved day? However, that morning the sound of a truck snailing along the low road drew neighbours from their beds to stand on mounds of earth and marvel with us at the sight of our home coming from somewhere beyond in Scandinavia.

Berries blazed as solstice rays began to gild the tops of the trees. Birds flew out for their days gathering while a mechanical crane manoeuvred its wheels up our driveway.  It grabbed a panel from the truck and a gable-end with three windows and the main door, designed to look out onto the burnt sienna of the mountain, swung precariously above our heads; then expertly lowered into place. Next to be positioned was the panel that held our son’s bedroom window, our daughter’s, followed by the large expanse of glass that would be the eye looking into the heart of our home.

Here was a triple-glazed barn-raising that the Amish would be proud of if they were ever guilty of such a deadly sin. Workmen, balanced like gymnasts, laboured on top of the now secured walls with not a whisper of wolf-wind to unsteady them.  We watched while panel after panel was slotted into the next as if it were a child’s block set.

Twilight witnessed the roof-felt being stretched across joists and beams, sealed from all weathers, and here was our house with its door open to the dark and the first lights glowing from the windows. In the shadows I’m sure I saw the slink of wolf.  He could save his breath to cool his porridge. No amount of huffing or puffing would blow this house down.