Irish Pages LTD

The Bone HouseAuthor(s): Gary AllenSource: Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006), pp. 68-71Published by: Irish Pages LTDStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30057419 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 02:53

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Irish Pages LTD is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Irish Pages.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 02:53:50 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

IRISH PAGES

My father, blue eyes never paler, in that lucid instant before they closed forever as though an unseen hand had balmed them with spittle one last time.

And he who had ran across the field could pinpoint to the exact moment from the waiting of his wheelchair and oxygen mask the morning the air exploded in fine dust as he pulled the old school ceiling down, his lungs eaten slowly in jest.

I too have waited so long in resignation that waiting breeds familiarity, and we forget certain as the world spinning as blood turning to devour itself, that the worm grows deep within the brain.

68

THE BONE HOUSE

1 So who lived here before us when the house was still whole

before brown sludge from the North Sea came back to float around the bowl

as we lay bone to bone beneath the beetled rafters

two birds washed in upon the shingle the rain making holes in the sorry roof.

Someone built upwards new wood for an old frame

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 02:53:50 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

IRISH PAGES

the blistered ceilings, the broken stair slats, an abnormality in their love -

I crave flesh upon every turn the youthful desire for manifest life

yet someone made this house

and knew it intimately

as a path through the forest or meat beneath the skin,

they bottled ripe fruit and carved small hands upon the panels

forced their love like furnace heat

upwards through every room.

2

I too have felt the sudden loss of small things: think back to the ploughed sands the cockle pickers under a dooming sky

the sea's harvest - who is watching the tide that swirls in, down hidden channels

carries them out to the void that is the grey unchanging horizon

tractors tilting like sunk chariots -

the collective drowned would have some voice

all damned in their ocean grave for centuries

with us, the landbound lovers,

undressing in the manmade dunes

69

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 02:53:50 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

IRISH PAGES

tasting the salt on each other's tongue as the sky becomes dark, the beach vacated,

the end of the first evening on earth the emptiness of the seaside town -

this is not Amsterdam: the houses are closed, the cafes quiet, coloured lights swing across the promenade

boats anchored in the harbour have practical uses and we are misplaced, wanting to be one

with what is dead and living in everything, the waves washing in like a deranged mind.

3 To say the land is flat is not really true -

every direction is bent, a watery illusion

ditches and canals drain the fields the polders healed, a giant heart,

by this network of stitches:

if the brain were topographical like a country this one is yours, scalpeled by emotions

the body open to every man who wanted you receptors tuned promiscuously,

they home in to find the willing flesh,

though you were sickened by this submission.

All the big houses this swift train passes, memories on a graph,

the Royal Houses of Orange, certain as finance,

70

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 02:53:50 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

IRISH PAGES

and this house before the station behind the silver shivering poplars

the sluggish green canal - I wonder, which room was yours?

4 It could be summer, so late in the year -

the restaurant workers are having their evening meal

at tables they have brought out on to the street and above the roofs, the spires are like minarets

of another city: in this house there is little warmth now the shutters down: there is a smell

of things old and mildewed -

remember the birds' bones we found in the roofspace?

dry and brittle and kindling, they broke like eggshells beneath our feet.

Someone lived in this house slammed doors against raised voices

smashed fine plates against the walls but mostly, I think, they sat like me,

at the window, following nothing with the eye, outside it all, as a ghost haunts the lonely places.

GaryAllen was born in 1959 in Ballymena, where he still lives He is the author of two collections

of poetry, Languages (Flambard Press, 2002) and Exile (Black Mountain Press, 2004)

71

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 02:53:50 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions