Blaris Moor

by Medbh McGuckian

  as well as ticking, should be burned

  within the yard attached to the house.

  Periwinkle,

  sweet memories,

  unerring devotion.

  Woollen articles should be cleaned

  and exposed to strong dry heat.

  A free current of fresh air

  should pass through all the rooms.

  Acacia, immortality.

  Stephanotis,

  will you accompany me to the East?

  After Afterlude

  The leather boats lift themselves

  away from their ropes on easy hinges.

  One passes the land of the dead

  on the bus into town. One returns

  from the root of the sky covered

  in icicles. I focus on their glasslike

  feel, their crystal breathturn.

  What do you mean, I am rapid,

  flying on breathways? No one

  really dreams any more, the bread

  of the dream, the haste of the dream,

  yet anyone who awakes has overslept

  the look of night, grass

  written asunder.

  My heart passes through the pause,

  the whirring woods, the nettle message

  of the ghetto-rose, that petalless flower.

  I imagined God as a book, not

  where you cannot be, eternalized,

  non-eternal you, reader in the after

  world, dropping your ghost-rosary.

  Butterfly Memory Object

  The simple outlines of tulips:

  what makes these war flowers?

  The war recycled like an earthrise

  photographed from the distance

  of a six-day-old moon.

  The crags of their petals

  dance out space with the smoothing action

  of the mouth’s own slidings

  till their two-sided skin

  bayonets the softer parts of shells.

  Still deadly places are folded

  into an unburial ground where resting

  soldiers tell the munitionettes

  they’re easy to sleep with,

  and for your button a kiss.

  Black Stone Mantelpiece with Chimney Clock

  How much Sunday there was in the half-

  discarded days—there and there, the flags

  holding themselves ever more high,

  stretching as if acclimatized

  to the born landscape.

  It had got too late for everything,

  the lamp-yellow mirrors each contain

  a different emptiness, smooth brown

  in the eyes, the time of their first brilliance

  sewn up like the sleeve stumps

  of an armless man.

  He makes his saints out of such things,

  as if woven of fresh reed behind

  this enduring: wide-open silver flowers,

  hands that know how to sleep, that lie down

  as if made of a single piece after all

  that has passed, to rest for centuries

  spread-open, starlike, dried flowers

  as if in the wells of a paintbox.

  With the lightness of a chime’s voice

  she gives her consent to the seasons,

  all their violet hues tucked in, as it were,

  like certain evenings, to this calm,

  almost velvet-like air

  which is surely not easily introduced.

  Red orifice facing the front,

  its inward carmine a little more yielding:

  will one no longer have to carry

  its heaviness? It was calling, as it had been

  calling throughout the weeks, all the time,

  it needed one in order to feel itself.

  The things placed upon it add their comments

  with all their heart, each in its own way,

  but there is still some other object

  on the bare mantel, pushed up

  against the white cloth …

  This way it is ghostly, it is still the same

  heaviness place by place, the windows,

  smaller than they were, reduced

  and completely in the wrong,

  of this self-willed old city, holding its own,

  between right and left. Hilly, like light music.

  The Chess Queen

  Where a scar of sunlight leaks

  some Eros for the dead

  on to the low mist gap

  in a haphazard afternoon

  of errands that once existed,

  a scarecrow with a yellow star

  and silver flowers at her hips

  gives the steadfast company

  of affectionate immortality

  to the dull world mood.

  Someone is gone, someone

  is sure to go, into the fruitful

  afterlife of the ochre-coloured

  twentyfirst-century water

  newly cleansing over snowy

  cobblestones old as the city.

  The sound of the sun purifies

  the spirits of erased aeroplanes

  as long as they shimmer.

  Who Is Your City?

  The canal’s middle swells with waiting

  for odd hours of night in the middle of the day.

  North appears everywhere, the now of the snow,

  warming ice counts itself away in different

  sun angles, like a block of frozen ink

  insisting on the line. The water knows

  the way down, to the Titanic and her two

  sisters. She rouges her silver likeness,

  buttons her gown herself, so high, so closed,

  her days malodorous from saturated skies.

  Do you think it reflects well on our city

  to ones who arrived only a week ago

  to go outdoors in pyjamas to the turgid

  bar district, the Gucci outlets in the city’s

  revamped living room? To photograph

  a child on the King’s Highway?

  Arrival city—where disaster zones have become

  more theatrical, ambitious parks obsessed

  with self-esteem are honeycombed

  with missions and endeavours and offers

  of salvation as an incandescent life force.

  Gone is the edginess of the city, cleansed

  of conflict, argument, debate, protest, ructions

  and ribaldry, notwithstanding the spy cameras,

  the pop-up shops, the flash mobs of drink-

  fuelled petrolheads, the new Purple Flag award.

  I still have to define my life through the false prism

  of Samson and Goliath, the ailing road perfuming

  the heavy curtains of Parliament. We still show

  our papers to reveal where we are going.

  The street will no longer lie like a doormat

  but plunge storeys down on to swift pavements

  pedal-powered by driverless taxis. Nobody’s

  living there, nobody’s moved in, it’s sitting there

  though the visitor centre is shut

  and they are lifting the paddy fields on to the roof

  which smells too much of museum dust

  or pages from faded magazines. The waterfront within

  the enabling bygone hedges is made of flesh.

  I speak the language, I know how to be a woman here.