After John Ashbery’s
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
.
The bloodless hand that held you
back from what you first thought
a perverse light behind windblown fog,
woke you from the sleep of ambitious moles,
the ring that engages us
to McAloran's dreams for the lesser men –
the small accidents and pleasures of sunny days,
of rats and ants in loves and wars,
toothpaste spread across the sink,
crowds that gather at Pentonville prison –
to your balloon pop, prick and blink,
where the millwheel of something like living
washes the rotting corpse clean
of the hooded eyes, the ears,
nose and throat that know
who is being shagged, and by whom.
In the pinch of death in that Fairy Blast,
when the stone rolled over and the Son of Man
is a hologram on the road to Emmaus,
did you rupture the barrier –
the puffed butternut squash-
and see, shorten, as the lips
and cheeks fade from the colours,
the distance between you?
Did you see, beyond the bizzaria,
the light that scared you, that’s more than a mirage,
a discovered country out of space and time,
an explosion so precise, a prism, so beyond
even Mondrian, who strove to present reality
in colours, and diagrams, that
you say were painted on the wind,
or Beckett, who thought it a passing hoax,
and gave us the idea of pure language,
form free of content, eggshells, no eggs,
yet knew he had failed
when forced to the material, paper, pen and ink?
Still you pause at the mouth of the portal,
the lips that don’t speak,
the groomed hair, still auburn,
the forehead, wrinkle free.
Your thing of beauty that’s the snare at the burrow,
the bear trap on the strait and narrow trail.
Go in quiet times before the throngs
disturb and distort with their
oohs and isn’t it beautifuls,
It’s their time to whoop and holler,
to mine the sliver of coal
that’s no more than the mirror
in the locket round the neck,
the form they sign
‘return to sender’.
Go, look through the pin-jab
in Eliot’s spread-out shroud, to the intra-life,
that gets included in the most ordinary,
see it through the light that saves the Buddha
as he's about to enter the fields of graves.
Deborah
After Edward Hopper’s ‘Hotel Room’
A woman in a camisole
sits on a bed
in a hotel room.
She’s framed in acetelyne blue
and black and yellow columns.
A luna light, that shines
from her back,
scorches her wrist.
Under the pages that cool
the beat of the knee that burns.
A travel bag, a closed case,
quiet, on the floor.
Is she the shadow
in the shade of a Palm,
come to read the writing
on the churning soap suds
that conceal a gully trap?
Does she know a bit more
than the man who plastered
it all, or the bellhop who
abandoned her luggage;
that maybe here
the slugman will slouch
to the beer snare,
where the gully is sealed?
Between the beam that
will torch her back,
and the promise of the
dark rug beneath her feet,
between the before of
the kindled flames,
and the after of the sterile room,
she, the dancing waves and dots
made flesh, pauses
on a flying visit to this place,
where the soul hangs
in a blank canvas
on a hand painted wall.
The mighty oak
That you grew there
was something less than a miracle,
that patch of land above a spruce
and pine plantation was fertile,
despite the warring tribes,
the smoke signals and
their buried dead;
cauldrons and bird shit,
cremated griddle bread.
Your bole thickened,
leaves in spring,
pigeons nesting their chicks,
anal bleachers
and Manic Street Preachers.
a mighty oak basking
in that tedium of the bored,
where the certainty in the sign
was scrawled by the wispish cloud,
the sun that sets.
You hadn’t listened to Saussure
when he whispered
the king has horse’s ears,
to the bees’ nest in your trunk.
It was an autumn, some autumn,
frost stung your outer leaves.
the winds from Donegal
blew loud enough
to shake down the medals,
bronze and gold, from
your coronation gown,
when, a shadow above
the fumes of days,
the blazing calendar,
you rolled with the waves
as they honed the axe.
Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer and Beckett scholar from Laois, Ireland. He is Poetry Ireland Poet Laurate for Mountmellick, Laois.
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