The Home Place || On the Hospital Bus

Irish Pages LTD

On the Hospital BusAuthor(s): Gary AllenSource: Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006), pp. 64-66Published by: Irish Pages LTDStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30057416 .

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IRISH PAGES

always too big for the world.

Ships have sailed and floundered

carefully bevelled handrails and cabinets have rotted on the ocean bed -

brothers and sisters have shed skins as you are unchanged in your infant cries.

Now you wait among the stones,

having carried my grandparents across long ago, for two dull pennies

from the mouth of the child you have never known.

64

ON THE HOSPITAL BUS

Here is an idea, of bare fields without crows

barley or corn,

but the rain, and the wind, and the endless mud furrows to a lone tree that reminds us of something, of the third month,

containing a madness of our own making

like red brick - these Victorian buildings lights on though it is only afternoon

half-moons, stars, suns, of imagination talismans dangling in the locked windows

small round faces not bothering to look out on a world that is no longer there



IRISH PAGES

as the one we gaze on through smeared glass the shudder of the diesel engine as the bus waits

as the laurel bushes bend

under the weight of water

and the smoke rises steadily from a kitchen flue

to blow back and forth before failing:

it was what they feared most, a faraway hand

that sent a car into their street

a solid thought, like black suits -

they'd turn away a superstition as the crying stranger among them

was taken out, a shame

a seed gone bad -

Lord, keep it from our door.

An aunt was touched by the Gods

vaulted from being a bit odd

to classified insane

a concept her father

couldn't contain within his narrow vision

she frightened us children

by racing around the house weeping, Beware the ides of March -

somehow the words meant so much more

by our ignorance -

then she was gone, forgotten, never spoken of.

65



IRISH PAGES

Each within our universe of pain, we watch the line straggle to the little stone church -

the perversity of existence:

as the bus pulls out to the roadway, to what we believe is normality

and the fields roll on, the rain hammers the roof, the buildings become a mirage like the hospital buildings in front,

and my aunt wrote only once from there - Look onto me, for there is nothing else.

66

SAFE GROUND

My welcome home was a bearded sailor blue on a gable wall

the open window of the cobbler's shop an uncle gruff with religion

blistered fingertips stained with tannins a mouth of tacks like broken teeth

or marriage vows, illegitimate children

the oil lamp a bright star above a cradle

mundane, beautiful for all that

without sermon, ceremony, or Mass

the squat chapel in darkness, the great Celtic crosses a sleeping race



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The Home Place || On the Hospital Bus