Poems

First Date


(published in Poetry Ireland Review issue. 114)

Switch flipped, spring arm pressed against the bell hammer

I am wound and set because he doesn't own a wristwatch.

He is new to this dinner and cinema thing, sets me on the table

as if an alarm clock is the most obvious guest and I want to blush

for us both through my enamel shell. He winds my third arm knob

to ten minutes before ten minutes before the film starts

just to be safe. I know this is a lie – he likes the trailers

dislikes drawn out dinners, hates small talk, doesn't drink

enough to relax, even before the fact that she is b-e-a-utiful.

I surprise myself when the trigger hits. Things start like this.

Catalpa


(from my PhD submission, The Tallest Man in Australia)

Wilson retells the escape to Devoy

one night in the Phoenix Club drawing room.

 

Here is the Catalpa, a pepper mill

and here is the Georgette, a salt cellar.

 

Watch the sugar-packet rowing boat

race against the ashtray British cutter,

 

watch the cutter fire its matchstick cannon.

The captain raises his toothpick standard

 

and points to the stars and stripes.

The ashtray runs low on fuel. We light up.

The Hunt


(published in The Rialto number 75)

Each winter, as it got colder, and the ice-caps were unendingly melting,

we would allow ourselves one more layer to wear than the year before,

rationalizing that if we indulged in the merino or lambswool treasures

of the wardrobe, we might overheat, our brains melting or something,

and we would lose any desire to better ourselves, intellectually speaking.

 

So we would shiver by the one working radiator in our pre-war house

from October until March, reading Nabokov, listening to Wagner,

watching Leone’s westerns, trying to feel the heat of the desert

via osmosis or some divine sympathy, force feeding ourselves chilies,

fingers too cold to do anything else but count down the days until Spring.

 

When it came, we packed up, shelved the books and records,

got mentally prepared to live outside, to touch the soil and sea.

The windows were unhooked, unlatched, thrown open, rooms aired

and the fights we’d had over radiator position were forgotten.

We paced the oak floors, making them creak as we stretched our toes.

 

Provisions were stocked up for the coming summer, sandwiches made up

of granary loaf, coleslaw, roast beef, tomato chutney, wrapped in brown paper,

packed in a hamper with cocoa and a selection of specialty teas, in turn

placed in the trunk of a beat-up old van held together with string, more or less,

which was reliable enough to get us to the state line and ready for the hunt.