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Irish Pages LTD
VisionAuthor(s): Gary AllenSource: Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006), pp. 62-63Published by: Irish Pages LTDStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30057414 .
Accessed: 15/06/2014 04:54
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IRISH PAGES
beyond this sandy sidestreet of poor immigrants is a flat grey shoreline:
and in a small hall in the Winter Gardens
they talk of Larkin and Connolly.
The electricity has been cut-off, someone is hammering together partitions in these once grand rooms -
is it Saturday? yes, this is all the Saturdays of childhood
sitting on the backdoor step too cold to do anything no one come back yet -
it's how we stretch time beyond law
taking everything outside ourselves and making it sublime - like religion,
then the sun is gone the walls returning to icy blackness like a racing commentator's voice
and I realise that love belongs as much to the ideal as to all the dead and inanimate things.
62
VISION
In clear blue eyes my father lies upon the sofa
happed like a child in swathing
how pale they have become, in dying as still water looked into -
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IRISH PAGES
fine boned horses gather at the hearth
big eyes stupid with running deep veins shivering in their necks -
what are you trying to say, my father that we could never speak of as you see me for a moment,
as I am, your son, and just as human, we were both young, as arrogant -
and then you are gone again, between spaces caught in consciousness and the organic mind.
Do you still see horses father monumental as stone old before their time
running scared and confused
through the wall-less confines of this room?
or are you already something left behind and I but a reflection in an unseeing eye?
63
CHANGELING
This is the uncle I did not know: I held him once, a dried walnut in the mind intellect less than a child
little hands, face, and thighs lost in baby fat
and brimful eyes, speaking for a useless tongue - Thanatos wrestled him into the earth.
The future would have saved you: sad crew neck, flannel shorts astride a great chair,
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