The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Mary Ann Larkin

REMEMBERING DESMOND O’GRADY

Racing the sun these mornings,
I think of Desmond O’Grady,
not the night at the Irish Embassy
when he charmed the cleaning ladies
into a pounding chant of Cuchullain’s epic,
his curved fingers beseeching them
in an ecstasy of besotted bliss,

but of how he staggered to the well
on the Greek island each morning
before the sun ballooned from the sea,
trembling hands winding up
the bucket of icy water
to thunder it
over his fog-bound head,
shock the blood
through the heart’s chambers,
thread
the fuddled mazes of the brain,

and, as he clutched his quivering torso,
how he made obeisance
to the earth and to the water,
pure and cold,
as was the poet,
cleansed now and ready.


MRS. CROSSLAND’S FIRE

What keeps coming back
is not the opals the fire mined
into the early morning dark
or the lone fireman,
turtled beneath his pack,
slow motioning down Channing Street
into the burning house,
but the way Mrs. Cunningham,
two doors up,
set out her porch chairs
for Mrs. Crossland and her daughter
and, after bringing them coffee,
wiped away the ashes,
from her white porch table
all night long:
The ladies lifting their saucers,
Mrs. Cunningham bringing
still another damp cloth
to banish the soot
from Mrs. Crossland’s fire
as quickly as it falls.


MOTHER READING

I had forgotten Mother reading
Keatings’ History of Ireland,
the green buckram cover,
the letters in gold
so I knew it was important
like the encyclopedia or the Bible.
The book moved with her
from nightstand to table
with her Camels and coffee.
It’s not a book you read straight through,
she told me, absorbed all the same.
She read Keatings along with
the society pages that taught her how
to live in this new land
where no pebbles traced the way back,
where the old people shivered into silence.

A cousin had given her the book
perhaps knowing of some yearning in her
not to be a stranger
with no old tales to tell her daughters
of the queens almost before time was:
Sea Lamb,
Queen of the Winds,
Ruler of Wild Oxen.

Did she smile to read
that even the fish sang
in that lost land of abundance,
that the willow-leafed arrowheads
were carved with the half-moons of women,
that Brigit the White Swan,
the Bride of the Golden Hair,
was also Mary, Goddess of Poetry,
her namesake?
After dinner and into the night, my mother
learned her people’s story.
You should read this, she’d say,
it tells all about Ireland.
But the book looked too severe
and I could find no plot.
Still, I wondered
why the reading took so long
and why you couldn’t
just go straight through.


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