Patrick Deeley – Sparks of Calliope

The Couple

Though there is the cracked bedroom ceiling
and the scraping front gate,
we give precedence to restoring the garden seat.
It mends us in return. Where flowers

grow or die, how generously the sun shines,
what the whitebeam whispers
and the ivy greening the back wall
hides, are little to do with our restoration,

yet they are all. Seasons swap the weather
about, blend, break, follow;
life’s freshet of sensualities
never quite runs out. Two children claim us

as belonging to them. Their hands
tug at our heartstrings and ankles. They gather
the nature of our garden seat,
how its flakes of rusting wrought iron

allow the earwig in, how lustrous raindrops
sliding off its glossed wood
pave a path for mildew. Our children grow
into ambits of their own, only

to come back, with each time a caught breath
that must belong to us –
as when the full moon stands,
sudden and transformative at a kitchen window.

Quiet again in the evenings
spent alone together, we look each other
full frontally in the eye
when we speak, and touch off old affection.

Children at Woodlawn

Our thoughts jump ahead of us to the dark.
We are led by a candle that tilts,
its flame cuffed by tiny, side-swipe blows.

Along corridors, in and out of cubby-holes
we ghost, while about us surfaces
slide, stretch, form ellipses. We twist corks

off bottles until they squeak or pop, tinkle
our fingers in crystal bowls, open
hoarse cabinet cupboards where jellies set

and apples season. Midnight is to our taste.
Here we parade old-style clothes,
gulp shivers, drown in silver pools of mirrors,

wrestle with wallpaper patterns
of thorn and ivied mansion. Once, ages ago,
fork lightning struck, frenzying us

all the short distance to the thunder.
We don’t say the truth’s clear-cut; or: no use
in being a fool unless you show it;

or: I am given to dreams but what the world
and its mother asks for is a sight
more substantial. We don’t say we are afraid.

Patrick Deeley has published seven collections of poems with Dedalus Press, the latest being The End of the World. In 2019 he received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Groundswell: New and Selected. He has also published a memoir, The Hurley Maker’s Son, with Transworld, and a number of books for children. He was born in County Galway and currently lives in Dublin.

My Father’s Salsa

He would jiggle the riddle’s circular frame
between his hands, sand dancing
within, fine grains streaming through
the wire grid until only shingle
and jags of stone remained. Then stop

those salsa rhythms I found
myself dancing to; chuck loose pebbles aside,
gouge from the quarry a refill,
shake and shuffle as before,
sifting so the damp, silken sand overspilled

the sides of its conical hill.
Walls were called for where clay ditches
had always done, the quickening
to modernity begun, cement mixer and silo
soon shunted into position.

We saw it as improvement, tunnels drilled
through hills, tar lorries,
steamrollers smarming a nexus
of routes. Decades later, in this underpass,
a muffled whoosh, plastic

scrunched underfoot, long mittens of ivy
darned on rock. I scamper up
and around, stand above everything.
Smell fuel-burn, feel the rush of the wind
no matter which way I turn.

Traffic bugles, trombones, an out-of-tune
brass band, the world of strangers
here and gone, all my townlands swept past
in less time than it takes
to mime my father’s salsa, dream the man.

To Judy in Her Studio

You forget to eat the orange I brought,
but as it shrinks, crinkles,
turns lop-sided, lustreless, you paint it,
and so your forgetfulness

bears other fruit. It’s done, I think,
at each visit, but neither you
nor the mould in its cold, clammy hold
will stop, with always more

to do or undo, get through to,
the effect of nothing ever staying just so.
Acceptance or abandonment?
Today, a last touch, a lingering look;

our eyes won’t outwear
the greeny white death by which the fruit
has lifted – through daub
and dust of your brushes – onto canvas.

Tag: Patrick Deeley

Two Poems by Patrick Deeley