Five Poems by Paul Connolly

 

Apparition 

 

 

He can’t return in the trope  

of ghost fathers. He’s damned 

and that’s no wandering, limbo,  

but final darkness, a tearful  

drove to Charon and eternity’s 

apportioned terror. But he 

 

does. Who’s to blame?  

Indelible, his life’s gluttony 

for reverence lives again 

in ancestor worship, or I’m 

his urn, the confines. Reels 

 

of revenge porn unspool 

and spool. I close my eyes 

but frozen images endure.

 

 

 

Silence 

 

 

Into abandoned skyways and A Roads 

birdsong was sucked from everywhere. Sickened, 

she glanced at verminous rustles in the woods. 

Beetles rummaged the brash, game birds’ 

rusty scrapes tore the farmland 

 

till the suburban DIY flood, mowing, 

drills, the insistence of hedge strimmers. 

Suburban crests and valleys echoed 

with boxy hammering, persistent as murder. 

 

Some say enough, up and out 

but otherwise we’re domestic, rage at the telly, 

pound our Biedermeier sequestration. 
 
The spread is noiseless, but chaos surrounds it,  

vicarious hubbub, multitudes of leaves 

shingling in a gale, a presence outsourced 

to panic, slogans, gossiping and bar-charts. 
 
All she craves is silence, not 

the thickened air between assertions 

a hand waved, open mouth,  

too much meaning whelmed  

with inhaling yet more emptiness 

into a mania of impossible thoughts,  

 

but deadened stillness. An answer’s cocooned 

unreachable in the chaos unless it makes 

its fathomless election. Perhaps it’ll choose her, 

they’ll share a voice and then she’ll fall 

silent in a perfection she won’t appreciate. 

 

 

 

Morning 

 

 

We’re splayed out, wordless 

in air, its fetor more potent 

than sheets. Her disarrayed hair 
bespeaks vigour and drunkenness. 

She yawns, cat-curling 
in warmth, the faggy sweats 

sweet with the certainty today 

is vanquished in last night, 

and smiles connection at me. 

 

My held-down agitato lives. 

I can’t fall into the mind-death  

everyone lies in. My heart  

whirrs like a runner’s on a treadmill. 
Some day I’ll get off

 

 

The Haunty Tree

 

 

Fear for you and fear for me 

Fear the wicked old haunty tree 

 

Its branches splintered, wind-sharpened  

or sheared to stumps, in a bramble skirt, 

garlanded with mistletoe, the old oak 

was black and dead and riddled with terrors 

we’d filled it with, dancing towards it 

and away, chanting wonders into it,  

as it loomed and stippled itself across 

murky washes of municipal sky  

over the recreation ground. 

 

We pointed at it, and it baffled us  

that the grownups didn't cower and dance. 

We didn't know their protective fantasies,  

home, workplace affairs and mortgages,  

so we bared ourselves to the power of the tree. 

 

Fear for you and fear for me, 

Fear the terrible haunty tree. 

 

When I last went home to Mum with Ellie, 

we went for a drive. I took a gratuitous 

right turn. But the Rec was gone. 

I saw an estate, orderly terraces, 

a minimart. Mum and Ellie were busy 

with a puzzle on Ellie's phone. I said 

nothing. Then we reached the roundabout  

and I swung back round and explained. 

'I need something from the shop.' I parked, 

got out and looked for the haunty tree 

 

and heard myself somewhere, saying, 

‘That tree Cal, it’s a haunty tree,’ 

‘Oh yeah,’ said Cal. ‘Who’s got the ball?’  

Cal didn’t dance. Did anyone dance, 

did I? The chant came upon me 

 

Fear for you and fear for me 

Fear a stab from the haunty tree 

 

I’d run the dances round it, real 

as Julie in the grass and kissing Julie 

in the grass was later real as daydreams,  

for I’d taken it away and plotted, 

and one night it hunted and almost 

stole me for a pied piper slaughter 

but I conjured my familiar, a tall girl, 

who held my hand and strolled and said, 

‘I like you, Dan, I like you, Dan,’  

over and over, till the tree was gone 

 

and now I found the tree, its shade was 

beneath a house on the end of a terrace  

fourth one back from the main road 

and it was tapping at the laminate flooring 

scratching the carpets, while chants 

of warding whispered up and out 

through the ornamental fireplace.  

 

Fear for you and fear for me 

Fear the evil haunty tree 

 

I walked towards the shop to buy 

a paper for Mum and sweets for Ellie,  

and a squall rolled from the river, from the ocean, 

under the changeless grey above  

and into my hair, bones and memories.

  

 

 

Brahms Variations

 

 

The flashy ones will call us giftless bastards 

 

we alloy boldness with hesitations 

then make hesitation our momentary theme 

foreground the rumbles underneath a lofty hope 

only to dissipate them in gentle 

ordinary rainfall 
 
spindle fruits are dusted glaucous  

but glow blood droplets and fire in winter soak 
a down-winding A-road  

waterfalls in autumn sunshine 

while debtor and creditor thoughts 

tug and pleat the canvas into haze 

and cast shattered milk-bottle shards 

at a frozen puddle’s edge  

 

structures arch momentarily  

then fall back into sands and nothing 

as we pound through sods and sods of morn 

 

Is it myth or did you play upon 

the cellared depths of Hamburg 

which skirted your progress? 

 
heart blows –  

what looks did she give you  

while your champion tapped strange repeated rhythms 

or when the tapping was silent 

what looks did you let yourself receive –   

and all the blows from the glory and certainties of others 

seem to collect in your sure and indefinite voices 
then harden the case around your kernel 

 
you gazed inwards to form  

to a purity of flow and change 

beyond choice and collusion 

but mindful of poor choice and compromise 

beyond participation or indifference  

but not indifferent to them 

 

we can see a boy in a skiff 

a young man athirst for lessons from the Wye 

despite the bare cranium on his portrait 

but we barely see your gorgeous youth 

you chose the image 

the bearded mask’s given sternness 

cigars and a sedentary portliness 

like my clothing’s cheap anonymity says 

keep clear 

 
set back from the fray  

yet all troubles flow into a place 

where you register and sift them 

where they multiply 

while you celebrate grumpy pietism 

and sometimes a celebration  

but as Italy’s distilled once more to lemons in the sunshine  

and you’re buoyed on pulses of Hölderlin, Schiller and Heine –  

and you seem to have been worthy of Heine 

for if all is straw 

decay and winds will do their work  

without firebrands and bonfires in the darkness –  
you’re ultimately in refuge 

a would-be non-participant 

 

though we all take part  

you often took no part 

merely allowed –  

as everyone allows so much of what surrounds us –   

all that perverted then destroyed  

the sweetly airy academe from which –  

though sometimes unpersuaded of the thingness of a shell 

as ideas debate ideas in strife  

and stress 

and culture –  

you seek my ears in my endless hiding places  

and assault with batteries of ink and air 

which I run towards again  

to embrace and sob anew  

your sweet gift of pain  

failure and imperfections made transcendent

Paul Connolly - Shortlisted twice for the Bridport poetry prize, longlisted for the Orwell Prize in the blog category and for the Bridport novel prize, Paul Connolly has had poems published in Agenda, The Warwick Review, Poetry Salzburg, Stand Magazine, The Reader, Scintilla, Chiron Review (USA), Dawntreader, Takahē (New Zealand), Dream Catcher, Orbis, The Journal, FourXFour, The Seventh Quarry, Sarasvati, Envoi, Obsessed with Pipework, The Bombay Review, The Cannon’s Mouth, Southlight, Foxtrot Uniform, Guttural, The High Window, Nine Muses, Eunoia Review (Singapore), The Honest Ulsterman, Canada Quarterly, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Littoral Magazine, Northampton Poetry Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, London Grip, The Saltbeck Orion, and Quadrant (Australia). Shortlisted for the Charles Causley Prize, he was highly commended in the Sentinel Quarterly and third in the Magna Carta Competitions.