Occupied Blight

It is usually between

the last of the brain's

end-of-day wane

and sleep we speak,

or I do.

Does he hear,

the landlord,

while I beg

for renovation,

if not eviction?

I exist between him

and the tenant who all day

prior to my pleading

I hear working

at survival.

There's a message in that urgent scurry:

the things I do to live

weaken the structure,

deteriorate the exterior.

There are breaches

in my breaches.

Everything's getting looser,

everything is less secure.

The jambs are warped,

the whole frame is leaning.

You are falling down.

Is this the way

every body ends:

a soul begins to panic,

to scurry more urgently.

With every chunk

of plaster that falls,

with every patch

of rust that rises

fear spreads

and the soul's breath labors.

Does anyone know

a good contractor?

Have I the resources?

Is there an authority

to appeal to?

              -J. O'Brien

Exoskeleton

Before reading Patrick Kavanagh's "I Had a Future" 

It's 1990 
I'm 26

the Cold War has passed

it's late afternoon but it was probably morning

off the 42 bus walking home from class -

in a sudden buffeting blow

of yellow fliers, pizza boxes,

butts, grit, dirt, the news.

Calling no one
for an hour I hid

in a phone booth 
to avoid
the pelting rubbish and dust

I watched in the gust
swirl
in columns
over Columbia Road.

At school I'd peeked
in my teacher's mailbox:

my story she'd liked, 
given to a colleague

returned to her covered in an angry hand. 
Mere miles away
SecDef Cheney's heart rate climbs
as he thinks of oil in sand

There, I've done it

I've plagiarized Patrick Kavanagh

and I hadn't even read him yet.
I''m not yet 27 and clear.
On my sofabed at S St NW
the cockroaches are unaware I'm near.
I had no exoskeleton mode

I hid in that phone booth an hour on Columbia Road.
                                                        - J. O'Brien

Area 52

The strangest thing she ever saw was her face

in the polished fender distorted.

The strangest thing I'd ever seen

half beneath the car that would end her

a girl I knew lying dead in the street

or off a bridge that stranger's body self-tossed

first responders milling when I was 24

or his bullet wound not visible

the victim under a wrinkled sheet

on a gurney in a mortuary backroom

or later naked high in winter trees

arms aloft in triumph over the torn

the birth of a week-long spirit lingering

by my sick old man hale for once

or scrubbed and made up him prone

in a chapel his false teeth gleaming

awaiting a greeting from some Beyond.

The strangest thing I ever saw was myself in a mirror

                                                             - J. O'Brien

Poem by Patrick Kavanagh

Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh

I think someone out there who knows might say that Patrick Kavanagh was 20th Century Irish poetry's bridge, if not thematically then in terms of greatness, between Yeats and Heaney. Apparently, he admired later Yeats. In style and sometimes theme he anticipated Heaney. In his lifetime he never got the respect those two enjoyed. Here I love the tone. Personally, I very much identify with "the mirage/ that was my future." I love the idea -- Give me back the fog! -- and the double-take syntax of the third stanza. It's worth lingering over. I like the occasional absence of expected punctuation. And how "without knowing" becomes a noun. (As I read it anyway.) These things attach you to a poem, they make it tangle with your brain and vice versa; you become intimate, first like wrestlers, then lovers.


I Had a Future

O I had a future
A future

Gods of the imagination bring back to life
The personality of those streets,
Not any streets
But the streets of nineteen forty.

Give the quarter-seeing eyes I looked out of
The animal-remembering mind
The fog through which I walked towards
      The mirage
That was my future.

The women I was to meet
They were nowhere within sight.

And then the pathos of the blind soul,
How without knowing stands in its own kingdom.
Bring me a small detail
How I felt about money,
Not frantic as later,
There was the future.

Show me the stretcher-bed I slept on
In a room on Drumcondra Road,
Let John Betjeman call for me in a car.

It is summer and the eerie beat
of madness in Europe trembles the
Wings of the butterflies along the canal.

O I had a future.
                                 - Patrick Kavanagh

Poem by Ralph Hodgson

'The thickets of the Heart" is such a lovely phrase, of course. I remember once being in New Mexico with an ornithologist netting tiny birds to weigh and tag them, how fragile they were in his hand. But I like the idea of lurking in the heart in search of joy. Hodgson also mentions goldfinches in a poem called "Ghoul Care" (unfortunate title) as one of the three charms that protect him from the master of "the Pit," that "prodigious Bat" that I suspect refers to sadness and perhaps depression. Me, I am weak at catching the twittering beauties, though sometimes goldfinches flit in abundance around my backyard. Maybe I need a new clap-net, whatever that is...

The Birdcatcher
When flighting time is on I go
With clap-net and decoy,
A-fowling after goldfinches
And other birds of joy;

I lurk among the thickets of
The Heart where they are bred,
And catch the twittering beauties as
They fly into my Head.
                           -Ralph Hodgson 
                             1917