CIARAN O’DRISCOLL was born in Callan, Co. Kilkenny, and lives in Limerick. He is a member of Aosdána and a committee member of Cuisle Limerick City International Poetry Festival. He has published six collections of poetry, including Gog and Magog (Salmon, 1987) and his New and Selected Poems, Moving On, Still There (Dedalus, 2001). Liverpool University Press published his childhood memoir, A Runner Among Falling Leaves (2001). He has won a number of awards for his work, including the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. Life Monitor, his sixth collection, was published in October 2009 by Three Spires Press. Reviewing Life Monitor in The Irish Times, Eamonn Grennan wrote that O’Driscoll is “a poet in confident possession and exercise of his craft. [His] poems do what good poems should do, widening and deepening the world for the rest of us.”
O
LIFE MONITOR
This sanctuary I visit still,
where my son’s body is curved
in the slump of sleep. Such a great spread
beneath the blankets, who was once so small,
I stand and wonder at his girth.
Only occasionally now I call
where I used to go morning and night
and listen, fearful of cot death,
for the certain rhythm of his breath.
o
Now he has turned thirteen,
and knows how to measure a curved line
or determine the volume of
irregular solids like himself,
gels his hair with American Crew,
and worries about the first spot on his chin.
o
Morning comes tingling through
along the edges of the blind
and down the hazy spines of shadows.
Here in the first light is a holy place,
a simple chapel where I still incline
to hear the sermon of the essential:
his breathing’s rise and fall.
o
IN THE KARST
ooo(Golden Boat Workshop, Skocjan, Slovenia, 2008)
Morning of wind and clouds and stinging nettles,
of pines and limestone’s dizzying falls,
wild chicory, orange lily, the smoke bush
plotting its riot of winter flames.
oo
How irresistible is your body now,
bathing in a pool of the Reka River
or walking to a free translator’s dinner
through homesteads honoured as towns by roadside names
oo
or sitting sun-kissed on a ledge of rock,
a Buddha showered with sunlit leaves?
How taken are you by the beauties here
in a landscape of sinkholes and abysses?
oo
One calls you by your name and suddenly
a transient poet is at ease,
morning a mottled light on water and stone
as the river enters the cave, then disappears.
oo
THE WHITE MULE
The white mule’s throat marks the passing of time,
an angelus braying. The tide has one tune for always,
a tune with a turning. Mussels in rock crevices
pray for the sea to turn its tune, to come back
swollen with nutrients, swill over them again.
The sky and the sea are quite an item, and lead
an exemplary couple’s life: one is not bright
while the other is dark, though on some skyless days
the sea in the distance seems to laugh to itself,
as if not just the presence but the thought of the sky
could brighten it. The tide has one tune for always,
and the bray of the white mule marks time for the land,
its pale green fields, its hillocks, cottages and crows.
I would speak backwards as a child, into my throat,
and everyone laughed at the strange ebbing sound of words.
oo
SENTENCE
I’m waiting for a sentence
here in this winter light,
a set of words to put things right
and break the silence of November.
I’m frozen waiting says
the woman in the bus-stop shelter.
o
By this weird luminosity
you can easily read the plight
in trees, the inroads of emptiness,
how the leaves that cling
no longer really belong.
And there’s a November light
oo
makes people paper cut-outs,
while a second coming shines
among the ragged gaps
in dispersing coalescing clouds.
Is it only when empires fall
that the sentence forms, mind to mouth?
o
Ceramic armies of verbs and nouns
interred inside my head
and in the autistic child’s
for whom some soldiers sprang to line
when cows broke through his garden fence
breaking the grip of silence.
oo
Not much to hang on to, this –
only a few leaves left,
winter in root and crown.
When the sentence comes at last,
it comes as a surprise,
bringing empires down.
o
ABRAHAM AND THE THREE ANGELS
I can never get it right, the delicate balance
of food and drink and talk at dining tables.
Neither, it seems, can the three angels
sitting to supper in Chagall’s etching,
one of them eating non-stop while the second
drinks and preambles towards their visit’s purpose.
The third sits silently, his meal untouched.
oo
‘Would you be one of the cherubim, now?’
Abraham asks, pointing his finger at
the loquacious one. The angels are all in white
but for black hair, Abraham all in black
but for white beard and forehead. And Sarah
is grey, in the background, waiting to serve
the ultimate dish, the course in extremis.
Some kind of tree or bush overhangs the scene;
in the sky there are flocks of migrating birds.
oo
‘We are simple angels – messengers,’ declares
the eater suddenly from his full mouth,
and Sarah thinks the word was metaphors.
Will they ever say their say, will they ever go?
There’s an awful lot of gathering to be done,
and I doubt they’re the type to take into it.
oo
Winter has hoisted its flag on the brow
of the hill. She holds her bowl in readiness,
a piece de resistance of the song-birds
darkening the sky. They are taking their time
about getting to the point. It must be news
of another departure, another beginning,
a pillar of salt or a pillar of fire,
or a cloud of unknowing in the wine and bread.
oo
GLUTTONY
The people I watch in my travels trail
heavier shadows than they did before,
shadows as heavy as a Christmas cake
with eggs and suet, spices, whiskey and porter,
heavy as the plum pudding I was once
served at an Italian summer lunch
while someone hosed the ground around the table.
Surely it’s gluttony’s repeated weight
has slowed these formerly fast shadows?
And now I see among them my own shadow,
fattened by the truth that dawns with age,
a ripe feast for the jaws of creeping death.
And poetry seems unwilling to let a poet
so heavy inside its portals of ice,
refuses to be the icing on a cake
piped with festivity’s legion of names
now that each day is a feast. Waving goodbye
to the spaced-out banquets of the Christian year,
senescent revellers trundle their shadows
from bloat to binge, their vows of exercise
take them no further than the nearest bench
at the edge of the lake, where a mallard chick
has strayed from its mother and mates and goes
piping in a panic between two jetties,
back and forth, back and forth. Meanwhile the poet,
his shadow replete with Austrian pastries,
his heart forty-five per cent efficient,
a vegetation spreading to make a lawn
at his aorta’s portal, is getting spooked
by the lost duckling’s distress signal, wants
it to stop, wants all the piping to stop.
oo
CRICKET
ooo(for Margaret)
1.
Rain dripping and one cricket singing.
On grey, the silhouettes of hills are dark.
The house on the rise is a fortress lit
among the self-seeding woods of oak.
In summer I dreamt there was something afoot
when so many cricket-urgencies trilled out,
but autumn has hollowed things to the husk:
one phone that rings unanswered in the dusk.
I am amazed by this call
coming so clear from the all-
but-invisible fields although
the batteries of the year are running low.
Rain drips continuously down.
Will someone please answer that phone?
o
2.
Sometimes when I’m away from home
and call you and there’s no answer,
I can feel the house’s emptiness, picture
our fortress lit but deserted,
or think of a film-scene in which a phone
is ringing above a body on the floor.
Here in the dusk I can still make out
the gap-toothed leaves of the oaks,
portents that signify… signify what?
What is it out there only a cricket
rubbing its wings together,
making a sound like a phone
that sings through the dripping of rain
from the trees of the self-seeding wood.
o
ELEMENTS
Rhythms of April rain
on the xylophone of the roof.
These early-closing dandelions.
Those lime trees in new leaf.
oo
A font that doesn’t dance around
shouting Buy This, Buy Me.
News of the still, small print
in the Endnotes of life’s policy.
oo
The chives’ lavender heads.
Wind’s fingers on the keys
of the untrimmed privet hedge,
speed-typing. Slow epiphanies.
oo
A MESSAGE FROM OLYMPIA
OOO(Museé d’Orsay, Paris)
You’ll find me presently, in Room Number Fourteen.
If you want to love me, forget the other one
who stares out of the canvas far too brazenly.
I, Olympia, would like to see you again
and wonder why you have ignored me for so long.
Don’t spend too much time with Caillebotte’s floor-planers
or Bouguereau’s nymphs and satyrs, or the sweet-toothed
dancers at Renoir’s Moulin. I too have a sweet tooth
for galettes. Beware the tricksters who approach you
in the street and pretend to pick a gold ring off the ground.
Gold rings, like me, are treasures not easily come by.
Look at the bunch of flowers my maid is giving me:
it’s from a statesman, he’s quite close to Bonaparte.
But, powerful men apart, I’m very partial
to poets and artists. Manet was the making of me,
and Baudelaire was bawdy with me once or twice.
In the Orangerie, Paul Klee is thinking of death
and as for Monet’s wall-to-wall lily pads, they
are fine in their way, if it’s lily pads you want.
When a young woman hands you a five-Euro note,
don’t treat her the same as those peddlers of false gold:
you’ll have dropped it searching pockets for your métro ticket.
At Place de la Concorde, pause to remember me
in the sweep of the river passing under bridges,
bearing boat-trippers, its shimmer in the summer’s heat.
oo
ONCE UPON OCTOBER
Drinking with great old characters
in the great old drunken way,
the old thought came to me
What will I do now that the leaves
are slipping through my letter box
sealed with the red of autumn?
I drove and passed the signs
of several county borders,
no wife at home to tolerate me
after the tolerance of
that bona fide fellowship.
It was Hallowe’en, the hedges dressed
as harlequins – later the soft
crackle of fireworks in the night
as I hit the doorstep,
a welcoming committee
of hungry cats, and why was my key
not fitting in the lock?
Eventually, there appeared
a beautiful young man
in cut-off jeans (very cut off)
who looked me up and down
as I stood on the threshold
dumbfounded, miaowed upon.
Interesting, he purred.
Why don’t you come on in?
Fireworks crackled softly.
The key eased into the lock.
oo
MY MOTHER IN THE SKY
You won’t learn much from me
about my mother in the sky
except that she’s up there for certain,
a star in a singing constellation.
oo
She of the solitary tune
in life (one that she couldn’t turn,
a half-sung lullaby)
is now an aria-ist, a diva.
oo
A change has come over her
utterly. At night I can hear her
from the garden, no longer shy
and tentative, no note too high
oo
for her to hold till the cracking glass
of the universe comes to pass.
And in the singing of that star,
I get a sense of how things are.
