Five Poems by Fred Johnston

 

DRY BREAKING

 

Consider this old shed door

Peeling, splintering, rheumatic

It shows its age.                                               

 

Nothing can save it

It needs pulling down

Unhinged, hysterical, sad.

 

Weather has not been kind

To it. It is in the nature

Of neglected things.

 

In the dark it closes on

The primal scuttle of a rat

The gossip of rust.

 

Tins of this and that,

A mower unworkable, a frame

Without a picture.

 

A padlock without a key

Keeping nothing secure, fused

In its parts –

 

Consider its grievous quiet

Its mute accusation

Its dry breaking; its grief.

 

HOW TO SAVE A LIFE

 

If you want to save a life, leave it alone

Have a jar where lives are kept like coins

Keep your own in there

 

Don’t let any curious fool take them out, fondle them

And give advice about polishing them up

He’ll start with the others and come to yours

 

He’ll wear it flat with his advising thumb

Featureless, he’ll say, it shines brighter

You know the type. Be miserly. Hide the jar.

 

Be miserable about it if you must

There are people out there who thrive on rust

You know who they are

 

They tell you to spend a little, then spend a little more

Let the light in, let the air in, let the rain in

Your life becomes one big suggestion

 

He won’t be happy until you’re base metal -

Your jar, your coin; spend it or don’t spend it

Be brutal. If you want to save a life, leave it alone.

 

PATER NOSTER WITH THE ISLAND NEARING

Sick to the bowels in the heel-deep of the boat

Negotiating, like rockfalls, the obese kit luggage of three German tourists

This is my gift to you, waveslap and keel’s kilter

Leaving the lee of the bay demands rough courage

But through the blunder the island comes in spite of us, low, black, remote.

 

Rinse our mouths in galling tapwater, in a cracked mirror

Shape our faces from their gargoyle grin of discomfort, regret, some fear

On the slopdeck roped and slithering as in a herpetarium

Alien quiver near the heart, all things that swim, our pater noster

Breathed on our hands to bring back blood, shed our skin, recover.

 

THE BIRD

 

‘ . . . . we headed to the park for safety.’

 

                                               - Kumiko Arakawa

 

 

There’s a raft of opening yellow-heads

Sending up flares on the slope

There’s a game going on, there’s no room to park

 

We’ve spent all winter in the dark.

 

There’s a sign ordering you to clean up

After your dog. The sky is liquid blue

Even the weather in your head improves.

 

All deadlines pass, and no one moves.

 

I think it was like this when someone

Looked up and saw the silver thing

The high sun making it a beautiful bright bird

 

The poet’s closed mind opens to the falling word.

 

NEWS JUST IN

 

I’ve had enough of death by text and Messenger

First thing in the morning, like old war telegrams

And make no more reports of old friends living by machine

The vigorous, vivacious ones especially

Who are not slipping at all peacefully

Away, who cannot speak or hear, drowned in morphine.

 

There is no response – I have no response

To the flat hysteria coded in the bland language

On the ‘phone, sentences that barely know how to say

The obvious; that a world has fallen in

That God’s a joke, there’s only dark within

The rooms once loved; all life turned past-tense anyway.

 

Give me the wars on gigantic scale

I can take all that, buttering my breakfast toast

Rendered down and carved into Mac-bites of news

Digestible as weather, familiar as milk

In tea, death wrapped in silk

A marmalade of information, sporty interviews.

 

But not these others whom I know and knew

The drain of the duty they unthinkingly impose

Death is selfish, sickness narcissistic, there should be

Some warning in advance of it all

Just time enough to let the right words fall

On the readied tongue; or on the screen, if necessary.

 

Fred Johnston was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951 and educated there and Toronto, Canada. He is the author of three novels and two collections of short stories, along with nine volumes of poetry, the most recent being 'Rogue States' (Salmon Poetry - 2019.) The founder of Galway city's annual CUIRT festival of literature in 1986, in 2004 he was writer in residence to the Princess Grace Irish Library at Monaco. He is a recipient of the Kathleen and Patrick Kavanagh Bursary and of a Prix de l'Ambassade (2002) and several bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland. He lives in Galway, Ireland.