poetry proper 2nd issue

8/4/2019 Poetry Proper 2nd Issue

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POETRY PROPERIssue 2


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POETRY PROPER

Featured Poem:Derek Mahon, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford 3

Gail McConnell: On A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford 5

Sinead Morrissey: Sometimes the scene is an avenue 6

C. B Anderson: The Show Must Go On 7

Jean Bleakney: Lacrimation 8

Michael Schmidt: Family Tree 17

Fergal OPrey: Three poems 18

Featured Poet:Vidyan Ravinthiran: Foreign Bodies 21

Ed Larrissy: Two poems 32

Emily Dedakis: Six drabbles 34

Editorial 36

Photographs by Paul Maddern,from a series entitled Harland & Wolff : Drawing Office Windows


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A Disused Shed in Co. WexfordLet them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels

Seferis Mythistorema

For J.G. Farrell

Even now there are places where a thought might grow Peruvian mines, worked out and abandonedTo a slow clock of condensation,An echo trapped forever, and a flutterOf wildflowers in the lift-shaft,Indian compounds where the wind dancesAnd a door bangs with diminished confidence,

Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,Dog corners for bone burials;And a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,Among the bathtubs and the washbasinsA thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.This is the one star in their firmamentOr frames a star within a star.What should they do there but desire?So many days beyond the rhododendronsWith the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,They have learnt patience and silenceListening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetorOf vegetable sweat since civil war days,

Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departureOf the expropriated mycologist.He never came back, and light since thenIs a keyhole rusting gently after rain.Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildewAnd once a day, perhaps, they have heard something A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blueOr a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.


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There have been deaths, the pale flesh flakingInto the earth that nourished it;And nightmares, born of these and the grimDominion of stale air and rank moisture.

Those nearest the door growing strong Elbow room! Elbow room!The rest, dim in a twilight of crumblingUtensils and broken flower-pots, groaningFor their deliverance, have been so longExpectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark Poor preparation for the cracking lock

And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,Powdery prisoners of the old regime,Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by droughtAnd insomnia, only the ghost of a screamAt the flashbulb firing squad we wake them withShows there is life yet in their feverish forms.Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,To do something, to speak on their behalfOr at least not to close the door again.Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!Save us, save us, they seem to say,Let the god not abandon usWho have come so far in darkness and in pain.We too had our lives to live.

You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,Let not our naive labours have been in vain!

Derek MahonFromCollected Poems(1999)by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press

http://www.gallerypress.com/
http://www.gallerypress.com/http://www.gallerypress.com/


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On A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford

It seems something of an irony that a poem repudiating the possibilityof lyrical compensation for suffering is widely acknowledged as one of

Derek Mahons Greatest Hits, frequently requested though rarelyrecited at his poetry readings. The representative function of thesymbolic mushrooms crowding the keyhole has been the source ofsome debate. But it is precisely the impossibility of ascribing historicalspecificity that renders these feverish forms so haunting. Thespeakers apostrophe falls flat in the knowledge that these ghostlyfigures are from every place and time where injustice has been done. Insuch knowledge, Mahon turns to self-accusation, orchestrating theirvoices to indict himself for the very act of writing poetry. Poetic meter

is made to look ludicrous against the ghost of a scream / At the flash-bulb firing-squad. As in Father-in-Law (retitled A Curious Ghost),Mahon associates poetry with failure from the outset poetic revelationis only ever an instance of his own lyric lunacy. But while A DisusedShed renounces elegy, explanation and epiphany in the aftermath ofhistorical violence, its masterful formal achievement complicates thepronouncement that all is mere vanity. The poems intelligent rhymingstructure and rhythmical variety may not compensate for the futility it

acknowledges, but it relishes the ironies of the attempt.

Gail McConnell


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Sometimes the scene is an avenueLes Murray

From the French, avenir, to arrive, its axis

in English has been angled backto approach,as though imagination faltered on the brinkof what is possible, and lost itself in process.The first heat you raise by your avenuesand approaches will fail, warns Saltmarish,turning a military term into an amorous one,and a hill into a woman. As old as Egypt,sphinxes not yet dust, set down as measuring-posts, declare the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut.

And where mists and tempered sunlight foster trees,aspens, with their yellowing witches tongues,the ache of straight-backed poplars, oaks archingto hold hands, the standing cones of the inediblechestnut or limes tiny, five-fingered flamesgather us in, shelter invading armies from rain,knock out the heart-lifting rhythm of tree-sky-treeto keep us moving, open wide miles of cities,suburbs, parkland both grand and modest,or some derelict clifftop inheritanceto us,with our sensible walking shoes and foil-wrapped lunch.The end is irrevocable and only ever itself:a palace or a parliament, a radial traffic hub,a winking Masonic watchtower over a fieldof war dead, but the avenues which lead us thereunfurl, as carpets do, into the vanishing distance,and the best of the them seem endless.

In Antrim, avenues of trees have been plantedsimply to hold up the road.

Sinead Morrissey


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The Show Must Go On

Within the boundaries of the Fertile Crescent,the times when peace obtained throughout the land if such there ever were were evanescent,and disappeared like water into sand.

What ancient kingdoms undertook for fooda modern-day regime will do for oil,without much difference in the attitudetoward whats above and whats below the soil.

The greatest treasure lying underneath

is treasure wasted: moldering remainsof loyal soldiers and civilians, teethand bones to fertilize the crops spring rains

will force into another round of do-or-die where future generations arethe wager. Holocausts are nothing new,and always theres a copper samovar

in place for heating water. Whether teaor coffee shall be poured is anybodysguess, but to stage a proper tragedyits needful to refresh the understudies

who must be called upon to act the partsof those whose legs are broken. Plots will thickenif players marshalling their martial arts

forget the lines once spoken by the stricken.

C.B. Anderson


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Lacrimationto James Schuyler

Dear Jimmy can I call you that?

We never met, but reading youthis February Sunday,Ive things to say.I found you months ago: last of the quartetin Carcanets The New York Poets.Its like Im nine again and sayingPaul! Pauls my favourite! Jimmy,youre my Paul. And now, at last,Ive finally tracked down

your 93 Collected on the internet(Sam Wellers Zion Bookstore,Salt Lake City).

In Afterward,glad to be home after the sadlitany of illnesses and accidentsyou say This room needs flowers.Well, for diverse reasons,this sunroom has acquiredthree bouquets. Its like youre hereand theres no one elseId rather talk to. I regretemasculating the oriental lilies(with nail scissorsand a saucer to catch the anthersand their rusty pollen).I was running out of vases,

wanting to double up, unmessily.But now their white is so stark,so clinical. And Ive been watchingsap accumulate on each stigmalike slow-motion tears. The heat,probably. All the radiators are on.Transpiration is a kind of sweatingI suppose. This morning,a tulip had flopped.

Just one.It looked sad;


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or plain bored. (Fifteen identicalred-with-yellow-edge vase-mates?)Id forgotten to check the water!Isnt it miraculous

the way they pick themselves up?Flaccidity to turgidity in an hour or so.No, thats an exaggeration.Half a day or so, more like.

I want to talk roses, Jimmy. I lovedHorse-Chestnut Trees and Roses:your discovery of Graham Stuart Thomas(he died last year), his passionate

word-dense plant books and you,his disciple, giddily picking climbersand ramblers for arbors, walls and borders;your adoration and admissionFlicitet Perptue, Climbing Lady HillingdonIts their names I like; and then seeing,on that Sunday stroll, the new ownersutilitarian makeover. The dinky conifers.There are roses, roses, and more roses.Its the horse-chestnut trees I mind.

you said. Id have wept.

Your citing Rosa Mutabilis asmy favorite, perhaps,thats what creased me up,had me scanning shelvesfor E. Charles Nelsons

Daisy Hill Nursery, Newry(another plantsman youd have loved:taxonomist; shamrock de-mystifier; Irish plant historian)and sure enoughRosa Mutabilis:a Daisy Hill introduction.The thing is, Im a Newry girl.Born at the foot of Daisy Hillin a 50s housing sprawl, The Meadow.Reared on nearby Dorans Hill:Roseville, Dorans Hill, Newry.


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By then it was all hybrid teasand floribundas and heathersand yes of course, the dinky conifers.My parents knew the owners, Alan and Kitty.

They gave us a dozen different heathersflower or foliage colour for every monthwhen we left Newry in 73 (I crywhen Tootie cries in Meet Me in St Louis).

Id never have known its historyif Clare hadnt taken me out that night:the Irish Garden Plant Society.By then (1989 I think) I was a mother

and no lover of housework.Id discovered plants and propagation;was gripped with the urge to name; dazzledat my ability to remember.Here was Alan, finally persuaded, apparentlyto talk about his great-grandfather:Tom Smith, purchaser in 1886of two daisy-covered fields.

North-east facing, buttopsoil to die for. Rich loam,slightly acid, eight feet deep in places,thanks to an ice-age quirk.Twenty years later: sixty acres, seventy staff,five thousand species (with up toone hundred cultivars each)and the largest collection of Old-Fashionedand species roses in these islands.

I couldnt take it in. Still cant.At least three hundred plantsintroduced into cultivationby Daisy Hill Nursery; stapleslike Prunus subhirtellaAutumnalisandAcerSenkaki.And he was good at publicity.Dont you love this advert from 1906:Daisy Hill Nursery is the only Nursery in Ireland worth a button,and is the most interesting Nursery probably in the world.


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underwritten by the testimony of Mr Watson,Curator of the Royal Gardens, Kew.And if Tom couldnt supply, hed source;Venus fly trap and Pitcher plants

from Edward Gilletts Hardy Fernand Flower Farm, Southwick, Massachusetts.Plants were wrapped in hessian,wheeled down Daisy Hill,along Monaghan Street,up Edward Street, onto the train.They ended up in Glasnevin,Valentia Island, Lissadell, Kew,Edinburgh, the palaces of Europe,

North America Australia even.Imagine the sheets of colour,the trial fields of broom, sea holly,red hot poker, aster, delphiniumIt haunts me. So much lost.The Wars, of course, and nowhousing estates, like metastases.Whats left is a couple of rows

of not-so-dinky conifers; and a houseAlan and Kittys Tanglewoodabandoned, half-burnt, but strangelya tended garden. Somebody remembers.

Graham Stuart Thomas visited in 1937, sawthe sad remnants of Tom Smiths oncemagnificent collection. And he taught Alanan excellent, intelligent worker

at Thomas Hilling & Co, Chobham, Surrey.But the rose your rose: Rosa Mutabilis;itssingle, changeable wings fluttering;its simple flowers deepeningfrom yellow through apricot and copperto pink to rose pink to crimson;its mutable name. And heres the story.Lady Ross-of-Bladensburg, wife of Sir Johnplant collector, owner of Rostrevor Housesaw it growing in Baveno, near Isola Bellaon the shores of Lake Maggiore.


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They named it Tipo Ideale, brought it hometo Smith the propagator and marketer.Except Swiss plantsman, Henri Correvonanother devotee of Daisy Hill, coincidentally

had already been presented with the plantby Isola Bellas resident: Prince Gilberto Borromeo.Correvons Mutabilis prevailed.As to why the nurserymen of Daisy Hillchristened it the penny-farthing rosewell never know, says Nelson.

Ive set my heart on a Mutabilis.Next year perhaps. Must prune

my thuggish Rambling Rector:Daisy Hill again, but provenance unknown.Smith roamed the whole islandfor cuttings of old rosesfrom big houses and cottages.But the written records are gone.Recycled in the 1940s war effort.

Ive three other roses in my garden:Gertrude Jekyll, an Austen rose.Remember? David Austen,that genius who crossbreddisease resistance and repeat floweringwith old-fashioned voluptuousness and scentwho, by the way, saystheres no such thingas rose sickness; says

its a nutrient issue.(O rose though artin need of liquid seaweed extract?)Anyway, the formidable Miss Jekyllit rhymes with treacle!obliges with intoxicating perfume.(Austens John Clare disappointsin that department.) She,who abhorred magenta,is underplanted with weedsand Geranium Ann Folkard:


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a scrambler with golden foliageand summer-long magenta blooms.(Arent gardens greatfor being cruel in?)

Fifteen years agoI bought a climber, Rosa Seagull;planted it between the purple berberisand hardy fuchsia. Every yearI faced the mystery:why did someone namean apricot-to-cream-to-off-white rose a Seagull?

I adored the scent;believed the written label.(Im a sucker for labels.)Last year I found itin a catalogue, the exactrange of tones, the petal number:Rosa Goldfinch. Strange the waywe tip-toe around our senses as if

complicit with the mysterysometimes.And thats my roses,

except the Old China Monthlyyou knew so well. Butdid you know that Tom Smithidentified it as Thomas MooresLast Rose of Summer?

And Ive had a bunch or two.A dearly loved poet friendgave me roses when she left this city.Pink. I think she apologisedfor the colour, a warm coral shade.(I think she was apologising for leaving.)Days later, on a trip to Dublin,I parked outside Glasnevin cemetery.Wheres the poet Hopkins? I enquired.Would that be Manley? the reply.Directed thus, I found the Jesuit plot,


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its towering cross inscribed (so many namessuch a little patch of green) and thereP. GERARDUS HOPKINS.And from a plastic bag I took

two roses. One from herand one from me, notionally.Gripping their heads in my palmI tugged and loosed the petals,rained them on his nameand photographed them.She hated the photograph, the act.It made herfar too sad, she wrote.Why do we expect so much of flowers;

of their capacity to salve?

These lilies are still weeping.Depending on the angle,their beads of light-collecting saptrickle down the style, or hitthis already littered tableshalf-baked poems, seed

catalogues, last years calendar,birthday cards, get well cards,The Merck Manual and your Collected.I anticipate stickiness. StillIve left your wipe-able bookin the line of fire. Any minute nowYes, there it is, right on your blurb,or more precisely, over-lapping two double-spaced lines

from Liz Rosenberg (The Boston Globe).Short-circuiting, gluing, cross-pollinatingthe gushing forth of confessed love affairs and

andrestraints and subtleties.Right on the money.And a well-flattened drop:about the same surface tensionas tears, I reckon, but clearerand with a Benedictine tingeor is it absinthe? Must have


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a Google for Mutabilisand while Im at it(youd have loved broadband)download your audio

Unlike Joubert to hear you listassorted vivid grays;to hear those last two lines:subtle days in winter when thoughtsinks down in the presence of an absence.

Oh dont start me, Jimmydont start me.

Jean Bleakney


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Family Tree

Watching his creatures with a filial sorrowChrist, not a shepherd yet, not yet a man,Propped on a cloud at the edge of things, his hands,Unbroken, on his hips, wonders who hell beAnd knows its up to Adam to determineWhat human pleasure might feel like, and what pain,To the Son of God -- Adam whos in mourning,Adam whose Maker has withdrawn the KingdomAll for a fruit, a serpent and a rib.The Son of God sees Eve grow plump as a pillowBearing a mallet and three nails inside her,

Bearing a spear, a sponge and vinegar.

Michael Schmidt


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Hedgehog

Its not as if one day the hedgehog woke to findThat the world it knew so well its berries and fattening worms Had changed beyond rebellion; as if in the weirdness of dusk,On a modernising whim, it swapped the grass for roadsAnd left these trundling fortresses, each flank of pikes,Each dragging, armoured skirt and burly bug-fed girth,To become by nightfall a hamstrung mockery of strength,Like cavalry bugling blindly into no-mans-land.Having seen so many others predictably groundBeneath a wheel into the tar like spat out gum,This one, wrangling progress, tried to fly away,

A sorry umber wing of leaves across its back,Vulnerable arse flicked up to moon the morning skyThrough which it fell to crash and die snout-first in a drain.

Fergal OPrey


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The Execution of Mata Hari(15.10.1917 Photographer unknown)

The sun having yet to rise,The Eye of the Day gazed

Through Paris; skys fuchsia,Its mustard-yellow clouds,And there, as white as a flagThe moon; its superficialCrescent contrived to drawThe eye, like tides from earth,From life in gaol to awe.

A cell is no suite in the Plaza.

One must make oneselfComfortable with fancy:Saffron kimono, emerald pumps,A scribbled testament.Make ready to die beautifulIf not beautifully die;With hands still fair if notAt the mercy of fair hands.

From behind a mask of names,

Accepting like yesterdays newsThe black and white of her terms,Gretja Zelle seesEvery side at once,Line and cant and plane,And might have been an artist,A Picasso or CezanneIf she were not so subject.

Dora Maar au Chat,Still Life with Cherub.Perspective comes and goesAs Mata Hari standsLonely in the risen sun,A blur in a tri-corn hatWaiting for a sentenceTo be handed out, a nameGiven, an action taken.

Fergal OPrey


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Featured Poet: Vidyan Ravinthiran

Foreign Bodies

But the jewel you lost was blue.Ted Hughes

1. Rajes

The sari my mum gave you wasnt silk but nylex,

difficult to google. That sari she watched as it flewup from the foot of her bed that night in the sticks,up from the bare cement in reels of blue

only slowly fleshed out by your adulterous body...She pushed you away, she says, without a word,out of the room where she and my sister layfast asleep manhandling your embarrassed shade

round the back until one last decisive shovehurtled you out through the green wooden gatefor reasons she still cant explain. Because youd leftyour hair unplaited, its drifting witchery grazed

your waist...And she claims it was the very next dayyour acquiescent hubby, still half-asleep,found the house key shining on the hot stone lip

of the well, instead of clothes left there to dry;

and when my uncle searched the well they foundblue nylex, drenched and luminous and safety-pinnedright up your thigh and across your breastto protect your modesty, from my mum and all the rest.


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2. Kuthimama

Prickly uncle so named for his rough whiskerstroubling my infant sisters skin as he kissed her.

I think of all his CPU fans, their white noise,the big fan on the ceiling smacking mosquitoes

out of their flight paths set on our sugary sweat;and I remember also the tell-tale red dotquivering on my aunties once-beautiful foreheadas my uncles laser pointer tried to draw a bead

on his remaining aspirations as he laid out

why a new computer room for his pupilswould mean knocking through a wall.A kind of code whispered itself that night

around the carom table, during the daily power-cut given to excessive cologne and shining fat,my uncle would have resembled a Buddhacarved of sandalwood, were it not for the flicker

of candlelight across his forearms broad scars.How Trincos barbed-wire mauled him as a boy;the kind of wound he lost his practice forwhen he stitched up men he should have turned away.


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3. Colombo

Outside Majestic City where the local KFCdid extra spicy chicken, and McDonalds poured

hot sauce, unasked, over my McRice, an amputeeeyed us up his stump a purple-black gourd

with red pixels on show through the bandage.His battered lifelines had nothing to do with age;his saffron-yellow eyes, as he held out his palm,raised toward a billboard ad for skin-lightening cream...

The haze kicked up by the breakers that night

meant a stick-thin boy came by every few minutesto keep our beachside table wiped and bright lobster and ros, the stippled thorax it hurt

to snap as we watched a Japanese familyrun the beach, smacking dead with their sandalsclear baby crabs. Some were terrorized into the sea;other survivors merely dipped one claw in the glaze

then scampered back up the moonlit dunes,playingfort da with themselves, a neurotic seriesno further violence could break. They shonein the moonlight like dropped bunches of keys.


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4. The Moon Under Water

It was the same day I got my reply unfortunatelywe cannot use your work on this occasion.

Fair enough the poem itself hardly merits a mention,just another unembarrassable ort, scrolling gently

as a teleprompter down the page to make a standof margosa glow through the authentic gloomof a Ceylonese garden I never saw hitting homeas only punchlines can. Anyway, as it so happened

I was in the WC down the local, all set to flush

when out the corner of my eye I glimpsed the BNPetched into the lockless doors scuffed varnish like someone had scraped their own house key

aggressively you could see it against the grain,or snapped their pocket-knife open, and with a firm gripforced the blade-tip through each splinter groupto carve here for posterity each Nordic rune

I traced with my finger, remarking the craftsmanship,painstaking, lightyears beyond your tokenswastika wobbling out its legs in biro or felt-tip yes, how I relished each letter of rejection!


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5. Rush-to-die

Irked by my readingMidnights Children in the carmy dad races a sky-blue Audi toward Ilkley

the BBC documentary about the Rushdie affairshowed him a pale cowardly man, whose unlikely

prose style in his copy, half-read, of the Verseshe found show-off stuff only, out of touchwith real Indian people on the street. He tells me thisnow overfiletto al pepe sopepe it brings a rush

not of blood, but of sweat, to the head, his hairline

now rendered beige by last-stage vitiligo;I think of the out-of-the-way temple he took us toat Matale, of the metal grid you cross on your way in,

washing your feet before entry like at a swimming pool.Of how the mawkish shift from hot grit outsideto the cool inner dust against each bare solebrought tears to my eyes he took for racial pride...

From the landing I watch his bulk doing poojabefore his commute, doze off to the Baila he singsin the shower; slowly the photos of mythbusted Sai Babareturn to the walls of the prayer room and lounge.


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6. Journalism

Im not one of thembut its shocking occasionally, made current

when news read-outs transpose the letters of my nameonly slightly Vithyatharan

taken from a funeral in one of those notoriouswhite vans and beaten...Though I dont know the facts and Ive revenge fantasiesmyself, loosely drawn from Pulp Fiction

and involving my grandfather who beat my father randomly

and took from him what he still somehow gives to me;I imagine myself like Bruce Willis with the katana, sneaking pastthe sensitive boy bruised into manliness

absorbed in his Tagore or Tennyson, equally dog-eared then skewering the morose bully in the back roomwith a gnomic one-liner before I take his headand set it down to one side of my sleeping fathers dream,

replacing his unfortunate copy ofMaudniggersare tigers, cried Tennyson, niggers are tigers! with a newspaper from the future, like in Early Editionor a photo of his grown-up poise, a difficult acquisition.


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7. The Mahabharata

Of course its only natural, only to be expectedthat Peter Brookss film of his own stage production

his scanty props and effects, a cast of cosmopolitanblacks and browns and whites determined to reject

the sumptuousness and melodramaof Chopras TV series its kohl-rimmed bluster,the kitschy glare and gore and all those arrowsthe camera just had to pan with from the bow

all the way to the pierced breastbone

with a whizzing sound-effect yes, its only naturalthat Krishnas Englished injunctionat the films climax that Bhima should break the rule

established before battle even beganand strike below the belt Duryodhanas thighas bared in provocation once to menstrual Draupadi only natural that dharma, broken like a thigh-bone

by the pragmatist Krishna, no longer a blue boybut a wily statesman, should, in my mind, clickwith The Karate Kid, the cleft-chinned master of Cobra Kaitelling his young blond beast to sweep the leg!


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8. Kutner

Noon sun picks out the stitches like mould,dots of darker green on the curtains emerald;

House, streamed illegally, mulls Kutners motive the kid who saw his parents shot in India and went on to live

with Jewish foster parents, changed his surname, out of placeforever and, for our amusement, at the mercy,forever, of his analytic, TV-genius boss,the insider glee of the outsider close-reading the periphery...

As the sun continues to burn through the curtain

and my dads insisted-upon triple-glazingI shift the office chair and eye with envymy bathing elephants painted on felt, so many

rupees of bad taste, the black and silver towerhumming with efficiency. It was smart to castthe beer-brown star of Harold and Kumarinstead the clich House calls the true non-conformist

the ethnic student buried in his textbooks 24/7.Well, he specified Chinese, but the ethnic reasonwas wrong, anyway. It wasnt hardto work out Kutner was his password.


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9. Wilde

The would-be gentleman refused the ugliness of I called to a ruckus in the street or that raw sunset glow

Turner perfected, Oscar would merely sayno gentleman ever looks out of the window;

and when he forced as in the Manics Holy Bibleersatz rhythms on his gem-hard patter iambs gambolling twixt Irish bulls well, the less said about such proclivities, the better.

But in his own way he was fearless and I loved him.

Forget Dylan the night I rolled down to Oxford townI spent reading and re-reading Betjemans poemabout our heros final stay at the Cadogan;

writing IRONIC down the margin changed my life.My aspirational parents were counting on yearsof elocution lessons, the Complete BritannicaId had to have.Of my older sister, whod reduced to tears

the middle-middle-class audience of her peersbussed to Horsforth for her Salome,we joked she might be the next beautiful brown newsreaderthe old white man on the box had become.


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10. Mercy Invincibility

So Im walking to the Faculty Libraryto research acoustic images in Andrew Marvell

watching through my hangover the clouds side-scrollacross the blue, like thought-bubbles... As I assay

the student crossing where you just walk outinto the road like in Manila or Rome or Colombo,refusing to break your stride and trusting the flowof traffic to stop for you thats when a coarse shout

and a San Pellegrino bottle drop past my head,

a held-up hatchback cursing a blue streakrapid as Hindi go home, paki cunt!... Putting asidethe Civil War for the moment, Marvells park

of peaches reaching themselves into the handis a way of feeling superhuman. The ear at homein his verse-line may, without injustice, withstandcomparison with Sonic the Hedgehog around whom

flowery zones wrap like a mothers arms. Should he forget to rollhimself up, before his foes, into a blue wrecking ball,our hero merely flashes for a second with such painas lets him sprint, invincibly, through just about anything.


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The Mekon; or Quality Control(The Mekon was an evil alien tyrant in the Eagle comic)

One day Ill go to Venus,

to confront his skull jawand reptile eyes,

and watch his baby bodybendunder the bulb of his head

as he drifts through the control roomon his hover desk

in the gassy atmosphere.

Ill ask him where Qualitys kept,and hell point to a room with glass wallswhere a transparent plastic egg

trails wires to a screenflicking pictures of Earth:a room with workers at screens.

The Capitol.A room with desks and children.An excellent cheese-burger.

Ed Larrissy


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The Broken Greenhouses

The rows of greenhouses were a nurseryfor the public gardens, but now theyre abandoned.

You can still see the flowers, becoming dishevelled the dahlias spiky, the geraniums crinkled,the rambling nasturtiums replicating leafon leaf, like little water-lilies on stilts.They dont look their best. They need a guiding hand.They press their faces to the paneor seek the sun through the shattered roof.

They cannot know that this once-bright world

is now a prison where their formal educationwont do them any good. Little faces they want to say, Look at me, but theyre too manyand this is no time for vanity.A blackbird sits on a watering canand sings his evening song. The ancientrituals go on. The shattered skyis still a kind of sky, is still a kind of sky.

Ed Larrissy


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Six Drabbles

A Good Lover

Mom wasnt a drinker. Tapwater only: Keeps the skin clear, the mindfresh. I dont know what she was thinking. I hadnt seen her in years.But when my best friend got the book deal, had a reading in herhometown I didnt have the money to go too, but I told Mom. Senther his picture. Tall. Red-brown hair. A good smile. Leather jacket. Hedhave been a good lover. He could cook too. Before the reading, they meton the bridge near the bookstore. I dont know how long they talkedbefore she pushed him off.

I thought I saw a familiar voice,

as I felt the bus pull stopped at a station, midway home. I opened myeyes to dusk, tough grey river, puttering traffic, melon-colouredfairylights on bare treelimbs. I saw the bus door open, whiffed snow onthe air. A schoolgirl (pink and black plaid ankle skirt) stood talking to athin quiet boy, his eyes on her hands, her hands in clockwork beat with

her mouth. I picked out words from their fluent rhythm box latch faith running tbere you again and before she pulled her sleevesover her hands inkling toad tingle thumb to chin = speak? lie?

The Orchestral Clarinettists Groupies

Three: Recognizable footfalls arriving at the choir-stall seats, close above

his egg-bald head. Feeling young at fiftyish, he guessed, after queuingfor the cloakroom and cubicles amid all the octogenarians. Sweater sets,hairnets. Pearls not from any anniversary. And season tickets for thecheaper seats, behind the woodwinds. First he was shy; he blushed ateven half-fudged notes. Whispers and toe-taps clued him that they knewthe scores. Tiny gasps as he hit pinkie stops and glissandos. He didntnotice them all growing old. And one night, a glance at the stalls duringtuning made him miss his entrance: Two.


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Twins

1. Persephone

Always a new next-big-plan with her. Wed gabbed half an hour before

she laid the latest on me. Phone calls dont make things real; but youknow an old friend well enough to picture her belly carrying twins, fourof her hazel eyes blinking from a crib. I bought her a flamingo ring and acard in Liverpool. We ran through sprinklers summer after summer,singing Eight Days a Week and Yesterday. I bought thirty-two babysocks and sixteen bibs. Were crossing our fingers her dad lives to meetthose sons or daughters (or one of each) both at once.

2. Oscar

Theyd kissed twice, known each other a month, when they drove outWest. His hippy mother grinning, elbowing Was she his girl? aCatholic? into avocado with mayo? Mom cracked out baby albums: hissisters, him, and the identical boy beside him.

You should meet Youd really love

She sent them back East with a holy trinity of wine, corkscrew, andcash for hotels.

It didnt last long.It keeps her alert at the call center, thinking someday his twin

might be on the other end.I know your height, your voice, how to make you laugh. Im halfway

there.

Held

The patron saint of lost causes lit my cigarette. I took a drag in andcouldnt stop just in and in and in until he and the table we sat at andthe room and the city were in me. Minutes ticked before I could let abreath out. Saint Jude found this so funny he could barely breathe. Heowns a lot of buildings here. He keeps talking about selling it off,splitting his profits with the destitute and leaving town. But his shoesare too big and its always raining. He thinks, O hell. Next year. Maybethen.

Emily DeDakis


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Editorial

It is unlikely that a new age or renaissance will be announced inEnglish-language poetry any time soon. If it was possible a hundred

years ago for the coteries of Ezra Pound, this was because in 1911 therewas a much narrower geographical conception of the artistic culture,which, for these esoteric groups, was specifically, and aggressively,centred on London and Paris. The Ulster Renaissance of the 1960s and70s is also couched in these terms of cultural kinship, with all theassumptions and assertions that go along with this. But such literaryclarions are increasingly unlikely to be sounded, partly, it seems,because the unprecedented accessibility of culture of all forms and eras(though complaining about this would be churlish) has detracted from

the historical sense of writers, and made them feel that there is nothingspecifically to react to, or against.

For the fledgling modernists there was also a clear sense ofdisjunction from the Victorian era, and from the ambience of Georgianpoetry, as they perceived it: an intently historical consciousness whichgave them a (sometimes overblown) sense of duty and of their place inthe march of literary events. In other words, an oppositional mentalitywas desirable, and possible. However, any conception of English-

language literary culture must now take into account the complexmaterial and cultural interrelations within the English-speaking world.While this is of course desirable, it has meant that, regardless of thepoets geographical origin, the English language is often treated as alingua franca rather than an evolving historical continuum. Or perhapsthis is simply the difference between good and not-so-good poets in anyera that is, the ability to attend to the specific resonances of words inhistory and in culture; the precision of the artist.

Cultures current ubiquity thus makes contribution to it more easy

than ever, but, paradoxically, makes changing or shaping its generalcourse almost impossible; one might as well try and waft away a fog.And this is becoming true of literary culture, in which novels and poetrycollections proliferate regardless of quality. More than ever, there is aperceived rift between the academic poet and the civilian poet, whichshould not necessarily translate into an easy distinction between goodand bad poetry. However, just as the prize-winning culture has led to aprofessionalisation of poetry, so the increased access to publication hasled to there being an increasing amount of poetry which traces a familiarpattern, taking the easy route to the pleasure principle.


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In an essay on W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney has written of the realartists urge to avoid the consensus and settlement of meaning whichthe audience fastens on like a security blanket, to be antic, mettlesome,contrary, to retain the right to impudence, to raise hackles, to harry the

audience into wakefulness. What we wish to promote and encourage atPOETRY PROPERis exactly this: the poetry of overdrive, poetry which doesmore than reinforce already-existing world-views, or describe culturaland political clich, or trace the familiar patterns of the pleasureprinciple. Being an internet publication, we hope we can bypass at leastsome of the market politics involved with print, to publish and promotedaring and interesting poetry, by poets who wish to become individuals.As a small magazine, POETRY PROPERis of course aware that its purposeis to publish aspiring poets, but also that its preference is toward an

audience of poetry lovers, whoever they may be, rather than towardthose who possess a secret password.


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POETRY PROPER

Editors: Miriam Gamble, Paul Maddern, and Alex Wylie

Please Note: POETRY PROPERis keen to encourage submissions in Irish andScots Gaelic (poetry, short fiction, or critical works). We are extremely grateful toPdraig MacAoidh for agreeing to act as editor for these submissions.

Enquiries and submissions to:[email protected]

Submissions (email only)

We do solicit material but your submissions are welcome.

Work is unremunerated. Copyright of all work remains with the authors/artists.

Please attach poems and/or articles in one Word document and also include thework(s) in the body of the email. Receipt of your submission will be acknowledgedby email.

We do not publish contributors biographies and do not require you to send onewith your submission. Just your name will suffice along with a declaration thatthe submitted work is yours and that it is available to be published in POETRYPROPER.

The editorsdecisions are final. Advice or comments on work will not be offered.


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Poems:There are no restrictions on subject matter, length, styles or schools. That beingsaid, 75 pages on the marvels of Navel Gazing, presented in Broadwaysized 16font (and the like), will not be read. Translations are welcome, as long as they areaccompanied by the original.

Articles / Essays:We encourage the submission of reviews and commentaries of up to a 1000 words.Essays of up to 4000 words will also be considered. However, please send us,initially, only your proposal/abstract/description. We will then confirm suitability,format and timescales with you.

Artwork:Please send work in high resolution (300dpi+) JPEG format only.

poetry proper 2nd issue

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