World Poetry Portfolio #50: Patricia McCarthy

Irish Immigrant

Blown out of a tin whistle, I travelled
on a stranding tide which was pulling me back
to be sculpted alongside rocks, the messages
the same in all its washed-up bottles:
not to adapt to enemy territory.

From an eye corner, I saw long ships
and Spanish galleons adrift in formation
with booties which had left in exchange
the secrets of spirals to transfer to art,
dark waves of hair and olive complexions.

In my bag I had folded, for a quick escape,
a currach’s cured skin and a history book
spun from cauldrons and folk dyes
into Finn MacCool, Brian Boru, Cúchullain,
fictions blended into fact to make untruth

a truth. With kick-marks of centuries
on my body from colonist robbers of chapels
and Georgian houses, I was dragged
through the stations of my own cross
over warpaths, my blank stares boarding up

eyes of Sassenachs who had blocked out
our windows, their sight removed,
not vision. Choppy waters rose in my arteries,
midstream, as I was dressed in caricature,
freckled by tacky lights from music halls,

and shown up – dancing mechanical jigs,
hands at my sides, then sniggered over
like some bad Irish joke. With my hair
corkscrewed by red-hot iron, I knew how
to kick up my heels with any navvy,

barrow-boy or drunk; and to dream of a land
where over-laden horses fell uphill, statues wept;
where there were too many First Fridays
and deaths from broken hearts. Yet the light
fell like grace over potato drills stretched

into piano-notes played with virtuosity
by the rains’ varying touches.
I had not expected a language, accustomed
though borrowed, to turn foreign. I wished
on my bones for familiar sagas to speak again

like friends; to hear stallion-stampedes
of my race bred from the whiteness of a swell
break themselves in to empower navies.
With the impossible passion of a first love,
I fell for the Ireland I had lost, chorusing,

with armies of my home-sick selves,
the refrains of deportees. Every immigrant
in one, I sat, packed in, on a cattle boat bound
for America from the Famine. Untouchable,
I lay in a TB sanatorium where tubes

stuffed with bigotries could not be swallowed.
Learning the million forms of decline,
I floated on an insular undertow, scarred by scum
from tides too contrary to be timetabled.
And I immigrated through different seas

under which everyone is cut from a single pelt,
forked tongues understand both their split sides,
and the light, however piecemeal, enlightens.
Old bottles smashed against ship-wrecked rocks
Christening death, with its the thud, the sole enemy.

Jilted Bride

This is her land: the swirling golds,
wild marjoram, the herons, kingfishers.
No wonder you fell for its contours
where climbers grapple and sandpipers skitter

towards the graceful courses of her rivers.
‘We remember her’, they say — the old-timers
in her local Tabac .‘The girl who married
the Irishman.’ In their faces, unused to straying,

I see the life she could have had: settled,
predictable, copper pans shone, floors polished,
alleys swept. Perhaps she as well as you wished
for other tongues to fashion italics

from the daily. In your own land, the skins,
even, of our souls could have merged, no risk
of custom’s erasures — had it not been
for fate’s choice of this French girl to be

your bride. Years on, I hold you in my breath,
at the corner of every experience, every idea.
Through the cowparsley patterning the near
with the far, I allow a flash of myself and you

innocently holidaying here. The velour shadows
falling from the sun, cut from the time
we never had, eclipse our atonement
on chestnut horsehair strings that swish away

impossibilities with flies. Through golds,
tarnished now, the café gossip insists you
remain that nameless Irishman, not the one I knew.
Unaware he is that I am the jilted bride

dressed, each summer, by the cowparsley,
in white. I wear, like a ring, the knowledge
of a divining through rivers whose sources
and mouths are one. Faithful, unfaithful, I dream on.

Yeats at Renvyle

The bells of fuschia, asphodel, bog-heather
swung their reds, oranges and purples in concert
as he drove up with his bride to the house
silvered by rain. The Twelve Bens stood by:

old hands at witnessing weddings of land, sky
and sea, the golden shore like a section
of some god’s own ring that could never wash
off the turf’s swollen finger. Everything here

was legible to him: the thorn trees bent
into humble cursives by the gales, lugworms
squiggling alphabets in thin casts; the tides,
high and low, writing their own tables

on rocks as they carved the coast into scriptures
stripped of denomination. Inside, hands shaken,
the papered walls started to speak of  flames,
ashes, re-buildings; and of the fists

of the starved hammering against them
for fish, a shiver of grain. His wife, picking up
a whisper of some Pirate queen married
into the Connaught clan who owned the site

before the settlers, heard her slam down
the notes of the tenor’s Steinway grand.
And a cold gust riffled his hair. Despite
the welcome, a boy made of air stood

over the self he had strangled by a pillar
in the North parlour. Worse, a face appeared
at the window, high cheek-boned: hers,
ghosting the infidelity in his head.

As the islands: Omey, Inisboffin, Achill,
Clare swapped places, did disappearing acts
under his gaze, the mountains wept his tears —
of lichen – down their marbled sides.

Convivial at dinner, he sank in secret
into his heart’s quicksands, the long room
in his mind filled with an Atlantic that lent him
the balance of its buoyancy on a salt tongue.

Note: Yeats and George Hyde Lees spent their honeymoon at Renvyle, Connemara.
           Renvyle was called ‘the silver-grey house’.
           The ‘pirate queen’ is Gráinne.

          Hers is Maud Gonne’s face

Dirty Old Men of Dublin

My childhood was full of them: dirty old men
charming snakes from opened flies. One
with a pledge badge on his lapel, grandchildren

like us, so he said; another hairy as an ape
in a beach hut. The regular always carried a gun.
If we passed him on our bikes, we hitched a lift back
in the bread van, in the wake of rabbits skinned.

Others hid in the grounds of derelict houses,
cultivating themselves in frames, under glass,
or creeping under creepers, silent as guards.

We glimpsed them from secret platforms in trees
or as we cut our wrists scaling walls of trespass.
We knew no more about men than cross-pollination
and, with cowparsley veils over our faces,

we dared each other approach their beckoning fingers.
Slimy and red-veined, they seemed mere mock-ups
from compendiums, necessary for our adventures

out of bounds. We saw one playing with long grass
as if making a bow for the fiddle of a malingerer.
On a slab of concrete he sat, watching us
seesawing over foundations of a new estate – 

on a plank and barrel, the child on top jumping off
to give the other a bump — into his arms. Rough
getting jolted hard enough to see stars and hear choirs

of angels pronounce a place without these odd men.
With the police-force of the Church behind us, we began
to fluff our lines in their defence before the Guardaí.
If the old men had repressed urges, then so did we.

They sit in our psyches now, the sad old men,
potential harm-doers, in subtle delineations often
of word or thought, not graphically translated

into action. We cannot disown their proclivities.
With masks instead of veils over our faces, we start
to creep under truths, under feelings, under whatever
is easiest not to confront – as if we are copying them

from some remove, under ivy and convolvulus creepers.
In our case, they stressed sex only as the undertone it is
at every age, in every life. Yet while the sirens wail —

who would drop the charges and believe us?

May Magnificat

Far off lady, our father named all the houses
in Ireland Stella Maris after you as your pull,
rivalling the moon’s, gave high spring tides
to his voyages and star-readings year round.

Sé do bheatha, a Mhuire, atá lán de ghrásta, Tá an Tiarna leat. Is beannaithe thú idir mná

Through Hail Marys in Gaelic he taught us
to honour you by heart,  reverently mumbling,
and to ignore the larger than life statue
of the Virgin presented by Dublin dockers

to him on North Wall for avoiding a strike.
We scuffed its plaster on the sill, rooted
from its base the snakes and looked instead
into your face for vision after vision, chanting

Agus is beannaithe toradh do bhroinne, Íosa. A Naomh-Mhuire, a Mháthair Dé...

It was you carpeting every month with bluebells,
stitching from their washes navy velvet cloaks
for us, your lap filled with treats baked
to compensate for what our part-lived histories lost.

Far off lady, bulbs from those long gone days
straggle over our gardens, their inland seas
dotted with our father’s rocking fleets,
your breath filling, still, their threadbare sails.

guigh orainn na peacaigh, anois, agus ar uair ár mbáis. Amen.

Close Watch

I sit beside you, observing, as if through a microscope,
your every blink, flicker, tic, and sigh as your noble face —
framed by the hospital pillow — changes to chalk, putty,
wax, alabaster and back to skin: too many metamorphoses

for a sculptor to handle let alone a concerned daughter.
Transparent to you here, I try only to keep vigil,
less practised than you who loomed like a moon
when, as a child, polio struck, and I was helped to festoon

with coloured crayons a diary of my delirium
wireless-tuned, by your guiding hand. I place a hand
now on your brow — not so calm as yours those years ago
full of medicines concocted, I believed, by you. Though

like your pre-war generation who called even close friends
mister and missus, you were never over-demonstrative —
you seem, today, to receive most naturally the kiss
I place, french-style, on your cheeks. As if you would not miss

familiarity and the chance to be pulled back into the life
you have been hanging onto by a thread. Difficult to know
what to want for you. I count your breaths, willing
the very counting to detain you, yet also half wanting —

in order to spare you any more — those very breaths to stop.
Safer wishes have me pretending the reversals amount to no more
than my stillness on a chair long since thrown out, beside you.
Instead of my girlish form, you play scherzos and impromptus

on the upright piano we learnt on. Fluent notes tumble,
technique exact, from your fingers without a lesson, your longing
to play fulfilled at last. But, while strange, chaotic words
blow like rainbow bubbles from your lips, I wonder what world

we both are in: you semi-comatose and me certainly not back
in the perfect partying childhood you sacrificed yourself to give me.
I sit beside you, my thoughts as random, fragmented,
surrealistic as yours. And I continue to observe each twist in the bed,

each shudder, gasp, kick, cry. The metamorphoses —
that not even Midas nor Circe would attempt to conjure — persist,
confounding science. Even centuries of sculptors would deny
that clay can ever be chiselled by more than a watchful eye.

Her Flat

The silver has been hidden away in case of burglars,
vases emptied of her favourite flowers, the toaster of crumbs.

Yet a scent of rosewater persists in rooms reflecting
all her graceful, dignified ages at once in mirrors 

that exclude the commode and zimmer frame. Echoes
of pill-shaking and washing recall visits by carers

who appeared like bookends for her life there for the reading
in albums, wardrobes, drawers, faded photos.

A stillness, almost holy, stops the bedroom turning
into an empty space without her. As if the naval Captain

in the picture, her husband, is guarding even her absence
with a timeless fidelity, parading decades of his yearnings

not to have widowed her beneath the arch of swords
sailors have held up ever since their wedding day pre-war.

Gone are the handwritten shopping lists left on the trolley.
With needs not defined as dependence, she was proud to afford 

advice, humour and stories for daughters who tried
to remain latitudes and longitudes in her threadbare world

after its gravity had gone. The extra banister on the stair attests
to a struggle. But the garden recalls her love of the outside,

spreading leaf mulch and peat on its beds, her green fingers
creating buds out of season on the azaleas and rose bushes

she planted. The tulip tree, half itself now like her,
under some preservation order, lingers longer

than she has managed in these precincts, its missing limbs
moving with her, maybe, to make new bowers in the home

where she is nursed. But the sun, through the bow window,
spotlights on the upright piano her favourite hymns,

refusing to let her go. Slanting through dust motes, its beams
offer her life-lines to hang onto, golden crutches to fold up 

and keep after darkness falls, weightless scaffolding that angels
dance on, evicting burglars with steps that resurrect and redeem.

A Silent Valediction

(from the Pyrenées where Camille Claudel was taken by Rodin and another time by
Paul, her brother, including to Lourdes, addressed to Rodin)

Go, go into the morning, deaf to drums.
There are crows enough to send you off
and clouds to leave behind faint bruises.

Sweep through mists, shaving your face
on mountain edges. Know that — for you —
this woman would have slapped her life

against a wall to dry into kindling
and offered up her lengths of hair. Go —
regret not the valley’s floral show,

its rainbows. Laugh off intensities
in new clearings, borrowing the armour
of rocks usually her dice when heights

penetrate you with music. There’s work
for the asking beyond those mountains
which stand like noblemen, shirking contests,

backs turned on your courses. Go.
Leave her washing herds of wild horses
with songs that would only make you poor —

before her river grows into a sea
and she words you into tallstories.
Consider simply the ravines at your feet:

never a heart’s dichotomies. Go.
Chosen before the sun, you cannot backtrack.
Perish, with her, from reality.

Requiescat in Pace

I am painting your name in loud colours
on the gravestones in every churchyard in Paris,
outraged at having to practise death like this —

with no requiem except the unaccompanied silence
of each moment without you; no saining ritual,
myself the sole mourner, a black band

constricting my heart. Were it not so messy:
our Love in the heads of flowers unfastening
from memorials on the right and left bank, 

I would order plumed ebony horses and a carriage
to transport the emptiness, my life dragging down
the remains of time, its cortège without a wake.

As it is, I reject the hands of those angels
meant to guard me, and ignore the ghosts
of the grandest couple we could have been

who wander into distances down boulevards,
through parks, creaking gravel paths. Only
the screech-owl holds my pain in its midnight cry.

The Seine knows I still know you in my bones
as it slinks along, holding in its span the mirage
I was for you. Devils dance in its currents,

laughing at the years that have come and gone
and will come and go without us, while scaffolders
pull you off the points of steeples and stars.

In case of regrets, you might find a vestige of me
pressed between the parchment of musty hymnals,
or in the tuning whistle for Gregorian chant

where I forbid muffled vespers from aisles to hint
that you were not worthy. Requiescat in pace.
Candles flicker at the desecration of my offertory.

Letters Unsent

[from a sequence, Rodin’s Shadow. The voice of Camille Claudel]

i
Woman flying out of a window
from the Château de l’Islette, near Azay, 1890 where Camille was sent by Rodin to recover from a possible abortion

In the record heat meant to be ours,
I have been seen as a woman flying
out of a window with a red umbrella
to set fire to forests which cannot  

burn out. Holocausts of sunflowers
are mourning, in black bonnets,
their own martyrdoms, attesting
to a sun that crackles as it sets

all day, red, over your absence.
You would only have had to be
in my midst to embrace me. Unlike
the sky which needs to study

its own image in water in order to
court the charred land, we would need
no reflection. We could have made up
beds of rivers never before stripped,

have composed on the mesh
of mossed tidemarks a new gush of music
for our lineage, giving — to receive
in the river’s tempo our own currents.

Yet the crime of our pact to deny life
by your not being here cannot be
covered up by the greenest slime.
Too much time has elapsed and no time

for me to give each singed sunflower,
each smoking tree, my dream of you
on which to thrive. Without you, I am
a pyromaniac, at the bottom of each ravine.

I fly back in through the window
with the red umbrella, pacing up and down
as I count the hearts I have torn from stones.
I let them cry out to you.

ii
Letter Unwritten
from the Château at Asnay-le Rideau where Camille was staying alone – to Rodin

I cannot write to you.
Stylish sentences tear from me
ghostwritten to swank confidently
as impostors in a foreign tongue.
Posing to their best advantage
they shun the guidance of my hand,
forbidding me a cue.
Worse than all the drafts
of silence is their final copy.

I cannot write to you.
Your skin should be the notepaper,
my fingers the words. The unwritten
alone is meant to be read and you
are looking over my shoulder, author
of my world’s night-long dawns.
Only to the unsent do you
regularly reply. Your express mail
my mind to itself delivers.

iii
Another Language
from the Château d’Islette where Camille went alone

If it could, my body would speak to you
of its own fields surveyed by the woman
inside myself — who trusses the tinders
of range and vale for the passion,

still, of a high fire. Not resigned
to weeds growing up makeshift fences,
to parched rivers losing their sources
in lunar months forbidden any menses,

she coats stones with gilt to pave
plains shaved by tongues of traitors.
Then claps at the desires disowned by me
which writhe into a cabaret in my craters.

She doesn’t notice shadows of telltale lines
from the overgrown plough, under which I
purposefully inter myself, refusing
your reflection in her glad eye.

Nor know how, though resigned to loss,
like her I dream of you returning
to spread parklands over my geography,
uniting the three of us in one burning.