Nine Poems by Thomas McCarthy

“The Land is not settled”

The land is not yet half settled
After our years of pandemonium:
This time it is almost too late
To sing with full heart a parting hymn,
Or indulge in the usual fickle
Humour of things. It is too late

To bolt the door of Ireland.
A penny candle struggles in the wind,
A corpse from the West rises
To face me. What was a house now stands
As a ghost from the Assizes.
Believe me, I tried to understand

All the signals we received from Berlin.
Little did they know, in our autonomous
Region all the gold was gorse,
And all investment was story-telling.
Blackbirds in the oak trees are trembling still

“I heard the Cuckoo”

Poetry is the cuckoo that sits upon expectant life
While God is absent. Something vague and distant
From a far field, the cuckoo pleases all of us
Without eggs to incubate. But if you want the grief
Of an orphan, or a mother’s absence,
Think of the cuckoo’s global reach, its success

At spreading its parenthood on borrowed warmth:
As poets do, in a manner of speaking.
Here is the nest, the unsuspecting language
That means no harm to anything in creation;
And here, the poem, the subtle invasion
That drops one egg, of both birth and damage.

“Chalking the road”

My hatred of bicycles has no end to it.
I should see someone on four wheels about this.

A cyclist would never smoke expensive cigars,
The ones rolled secretly by a Cuban exile in LA,

Or the ones with a portrait of the patriot Bolivar -
Yes, I can understand that. But two wheels

Claiming possession of my traffic lane,
Two wheels forcing me into a passive cycling,

Into this abomination with loose chains,
This is beyond words, beyond any walnut

Dashboard. Now I see thin youths, architects
And such like, placing chalk upon the road;

Choking off the lifeblood of traffic, the loveliness
Of motor cars. Of my city they will make a dry dessert:

Here is a doughnut drying in the sun;
Here, the arid bicycle, the granite pedestrian.

“Petrichor”

Our kitten turns to deliver its encomium,
Purring as if a lump of tabby quartz
Propelled it so. It shares this petrichor
With the last bumblebees seeking glamour.
Wet stones release their chatoyant gaze
As I shake Molly’s cocktail shaker.
Here is quartered lime after unexpected rain:
We have lost our house, but earth is warm
Beneath your cherished tintinnabulation.

“The last architect in the Irish public service”

They told me to draw a memorable door
But I had to ask them what that was for
When no one would be left in this particular
Drawing office or its marble corridor.
They said an architect could hardly refuse
To draw a closure around the Malton views
Of old Dublin. But, I could choose,
They said, between a door as soft as spruce
Or a classic mahogany one. It should be
A simple rectangle, a nod to antiquity;
A door proud to have once been a tree,
But happy with change management. See,
They said, see how government is now
A smaller version of our selves, see how
One old corridor is emptied. This will allow
What is private to grow again. You know
That all of knowledge is but a toll-road;
The highway-builder must receive what is owed.
What you built is now cross-hatched and shadowed:
So, draw us one final door with electronic code.

“Picasso’s ‘Composition Au Papillon’”

When I contemplate your magic gifts tonight,
alone, the back-boiler creaking, the frosty moonlight,
I am reminded that you were Leonardo
reincarnate, the Cuchulain of canvas.
Paint never buckled under such pressure —
Guernica, vulgar goats, the portraits of Olga;
even something as brittle as ’Composition au Papillon’
has the finished look to make gods finite.

In Paris, at fifty-one, you could play God
with cloth, string, a thumb-tack, oil. Truth is
we are all born to an artless, provincial stench.
If we are lucky, Picasso, we die French.

“Thinking of my father in the musée Picasso”

It breaks my heart to think of your failures,
for you were not a bad man, just hopeless.
The lost Party, those lethal social forces
that broke your will broke others less poor.
Talent is a muscle that needs constant exercise
and Ireland was your disagreeable milieu —
all the end-of-term banter of the Dail
couldn’t hide that truth. But look at Picasso:
he was a bullish, besieged Stalinist,
yet he worked and worked and worked.
Every butterfly of an idea he embraced became art;
and every false move he made used material
more permanent and beautiful than the Dail.

“The Fiction, The Sea”

You keep returning to the sea as if you’d lost a bracelet
In the water, or some such valuable and peaceful thing.
It is part of the problem of being a girl, my mother
Always said, such possessions as become windows
And mirrors to call a woman back, to demand closing -
Or as Henry James said, for he was no mother,
As the picture is reality so the novel is history
And not as the poem is: a metaphor and closed thing.
Strange how I could never go back to that spit of sand,
The sea-warren of the Cunnigar, in Dungarvan Bay,
For I would never want to deconstruct what was
Never whole, what was tentative and poorly given;
What it was that I chased after among blue razor shells.
But I digress, for this is about you, returning late
In the summer to a wild and restless sea; it is you
Grown restless from inadequate sunshine, turning back
Like a pilgrim to inhale the iodine of the far West;
Going farther, as you must, to meet the sea half-way,
The sea in its life being more entrenched than us
And far more Flaubertian. So what of your bracelet,
Then, and where did that come from? Nothing but salt
At the very edge of summer before it flips away forever,
Salt and sand that makes a kind of mirror, nothing but salt
Is left on the hard pavement out of the sea and kelp too,
And its iodine; all strewn on the cold water. As you figure
And pick among things like a novelist, the tide bathes
Your whitened toes, it advances and recedes. My own
Beloved, the sea’s droll pathos kisses you: it is your fable.

“While you sleep”

I watch the timeless candle burning at both ends.
At one end it must be my mother’s face
And her infinite correlation with my own fate.
There’s no other end that I would put in place

At this moment; or at any moment in a poem.
The candle burns in its circadian rhythms,
Leaving words behind it on her waxy lips:
She told stories to the dark while the world slept

And like poems she didn’t need an end
But supped off the oils of perpetual change.
I watch the warm light on your own restless face.
You are restless like a mother. The precipice

Of night threatens you, though I am here
Always to hold you. You must learn to un-drown
Yourself, to float the way light does
From a timeless candle. Your superstition grows

In the absence of day, but night has no substance
When we are together. Look at the stars
Through the bedroom window: their universe
Is nothing in this huge room, in the light from us.
Where all our demons hurriedly went in.