Eight Poems by John Doyle

 

Abe and Beatrice : St. Louis County, May 24th 1941

 

From great expectations greater things come forth,

a bustling farm, nurtured stock, cold and spritely waters

abundant in our wells;

 

From greater expectations greatest things come,

simmering song, happy dogs, Henry Ford's new-fangled truck

dropping goodwill porch-side : this is all we needed, is everything we want

 

 

Advertisement in the London Times, Spring 1976, for David Monrow's Upcoming Recital in

Wigmore Hall on June 13th of That Year

 

Mr Monrow cannot attend, it grieves me to mention,

morning light gave its electrics to a black-eyed stowaway,

day-time's hurried fields

are absent also,

 

gored by starving tractors

watching us the willowed youth

sat on farmyard gates,

while David, our dearest soul

 

entered his hayloft,

his skin troubled by vinyl's hiss,

oldest song gone away,

fathers all absent, thus

 

music's lustre was doused -

among the hissing of worried hay,

I’m afraid that Mr. Monrow

will not be joining us today

 

Forsan miseros meliora sequentur

 

 

A House is Not a Home

 

What Heidegger says, Derrida doubles,

about deconstruction -

nothing matches all in the brutal axis of time, evil,

a man's need to strangle by penis,

 

hoping his horses are saddled up by dawn,

to ride to posterity on a gallery wall.

Nothing matches how brick, when aligned to brick,

becomes a mass of time, benevolence,

 

the family's succour

giving lungs its reasons from within;

scientists, Gods, even barbarians, saw this logic when they decided

what dawn meant for them;

 

a house cannot be a home for any woman, child or man

when deconstruction comes so swift,

begotten of no God, no science,

or savage whose only logic was to eat, breathe, be warm,

 

no Moskal beast could reconstruct these pieces,

dust from each brick a thousand endless tons

that fills his lungs and rots his throat

 

when he roars for a prayer of water in the gut of peklo

 

 

Bummed Out in Nellcôte

 

If I put false gods before the Almighty

I guess it may as well be you

who sails on oceans on mucus sheets

 

with no hope in a life of prayer,

just a warm breeze note to the one I cling to

like a child to its mother through a hurricane -

 

I just want to see his face,

turning all my ears away to a breeze

begging through a bullet hole your body glares.

 

A whitewash wooden church in a small midwest town

is looking for Jacob and James, Rachel and Ruth,

I turn my eyes to you,

 

like Jesus and his holes

wrapped up on a rusty jism couch,

and I know you've seen the Almighty's face

 

and you're free to sit on the wrong side of my shoulder,

and I know the Almighty will forgive you

when your disciples are selling cat food on my TV screen.

 

I followed an ambulance through the town of Saint-Tropez

to see what dead people

look like that moment they die -

 

I hope they've see his face

walking chest high in weeping corn

to that wooden church you built me in Nellcôte

 

 

Gotcha

 

So I left his shapes behind me,

sort of like a setting sun, starved of light,

love, warmth - former bosses passing through

have those anaemic aversions, I’ve learned.

 

Taking guitar lessons now, is he?

I think it's a guitar, possibly banjo -

he does have that fat mafioso-hair, in wavy ripples

like Big Pussy, that hillbilly speedboat slob in Live and Let Die -

 

knocked out on the jetty. Must be a banjo?

Christ, I think it is. You see, he's one of those

"no-one ever stops learning" types

who would climb Everest solo

 

and die 2/10ths of the way up, just to prove something to his wife, his kid -

(one kid only, of course, nine years after marriage, career comes first) -

I leave him behind me,

remember shaking hands, late August,

 

pub like a trawler full of fish, soaking,

slapping-off decks; "Don't forget Ken, let accounts know

I did those three extra weekends for you" - "Sure will".

He didn't. It's a banjo then. Anything sunlight leaves

 

squeezes through his hair

like a garden-hoe clenched in stone, gangling weeds.

I'll leave him behind me - some day -

 

a splat of banjo on railway platform,

dissonance, the look across his shoulder at me

as he crouches -

his look away. Gotcha, big boy - gotcha

 

 

A Padlock Swings Gently on a Smoke-Stained Metal Door

Artane Dublin, 1981

 

Valentine never left us on a noose

nor immolated by aftershave desire,

a noose choking half a century from factory hands,

 

disco shoes Cheryl Ladd wears at sunset, oxygen its aperitif.

A padlock noose makes modern music

on spring time's chilled metal penance,

 

a shadow Valentine's babies point at,

wondering if that's a late late taxi cab

or 40 years of trieste

 

turning ash into braver shadows -

the ones that brighten

rather than darken. Bravest shadows alight - guiding the heart of the sun

 

 

Beit-Hanoun

 

Through snapped-neck bricks

I hold clocks that cry,

first time I've seen numbers bleeding

while flesh chills itself with silence,

 

Beit-Hanoun's tears

washing midnights free from calendars,

In its alibi undreamed of in houses held firm by dust,

its time and hour raped, bloodied, its skyline opaque and numb,

 

Mansour and El Masry's creeds

like a tongue coughing on its mud -

not simply a word of God, of any God,

a word instead of a place our tribe can sit

 

watching strange-horned beasts

turning strange to feral

and trample the day from our clocks -

choking the light from our timeless moon -

 

and when I fumble through these ruins

I wonder if brick and bone

can be stitched like love is to its past,

for nowhere else do I know such a calamity of matter,

 

except maybe

alphabets of failure and memory,

welded in sorrow

on a shattered maquette

 

 

The Girl

Somewhere in Poland, 1943

 

When you're living later than a clock could understand,

Adonis wraps his jaws around a pizza

 

hearing Mick Jagger pleading with Jesus,

that's when I'll give silence its saddle made of gold,

 

ride my horse toward that boxcar's salt-wet throat

knowing Jesus says nothing more than needed

 

when repo-men are dying in their thousands

holding out on a spit-numbed cartridge

 

on a flight home to the moon.

Doesn't matter if I win that Mustang or I lose a roof from my floor,

 

that girl's still there, on a street somewhere in 1943,

looking at me one more time last Sunday night,

 

the grocer Neumann's daughter, eyes blacker than that black and white

spinning as a coin that landed on a crack that split the moon,

 

the girl with the lightless star

gone into orbit on that wintered beat in her astral heart

John Doyle is from County Kildare in Ireland. He returned to writing poetry in February 2015 after a gap of nearly 7 years. Since then he's had 7 poetry collections published. His 7th collection, "Isolated Incidents" was published by Pski's Porch in Summer 2021.