Issue 4: Medbh McGuckian

She can no longer pretend to be

Looking through an open window

At sea ringing the city, through

The skypaint which appears

To have been brushed around the house.

Still I judge her life still saved

Though I say it who shouldn’t,

Give or take a few months,

This connection between the two winters,

A love that can exist only in summer.

How can the thought of her take her

Away, grain by coral grain,

Beyond the reach of outstretched arms

As though the reflection of her here,

And then there, were lying in a grape,

WILLOWWARE CUP

She can no longer pretend to be

Looking through an open window

At sea ringing the city, through

The skypaint which appears

To have been brushed around the house.

Still I judge her life still saved

Though I say it who shouldn’t,

Give or take a few months,

This connection between the two winters,

A love that can exist only in summer.

How can the thought of her take her

Away, grain by coral grain,

Beyond the reach of outstretched arms

As though the reflection of her here,

And then there, were lying in a grape,

Whirl of rose and lemon? All at once,

Four colours have settled on her as

Impermanently as snowflakes brushing

The tree at the gate, their haloes

Like ointment or dough, yellow-white

Translucence along her underbreast’s

New nipple, harsher silver wrist

Movements pushing her left side

Gently back without smothering

What might be (please let it be!)

Her hand. Which also never turned

To the back of the book, but Mary-like

Clearly suffered decades long

In the idealised garden.

The mere gathers in the curtains

Make her sit up in a false glare

Though cheek touches floor,

And the knuckles of her skirt’s

Plain-weave linen, unaltered

At the hem, are yours

More than ever, the careful flesh

Of her formless back as it is known to be

By the no longer existing ceiling,

Of her rained-in pupil, by the autumn

Rustling to pieces the roadside elm.

THE DOLL FUNERAL

Those who live inside the year,

In its ever greater lateness,

Are uncertain of its ability to end

When the calendar turns over.

It is more like the weakness

Of my mind than the strength of yours —

As if there were no such serpent

In the slice of the house — in the wide town.

During the next month she came round

To a perusal of her bracelets

And her ultra-Irish body, the marriage

That might be in the north of the future air.

My two-piece calico, clockwork, creeping

Doll, so indestructible, so heavy she was

Moved about on rollers

With large, protruding gears,

My talking doll nearly as perfect

As machinery could be, enigmatic,

Vain, mute and delicate, with voice

Too faint to be heard,

When the sheet music inside

Her doll head with two opposite faces

And movable lower lip, stuck,

Buzzing like an entrapped bee.

SHE  WEARS  THE  SKY

The horizon line embraces the drowsy river docks:

The deep peacock patch of water reaching the dark

Blends with it.

The hills pick up a saintly pallor

From the skin of one doing penitence.

The swallows linger on, as if they forgot.

I gaze into the sealed eyes of my mother,

Seen, not visited, not forgotten,

In the centre of her own picture,

Who wove her own background

With no Martha-work to be done,

As women look when they return to their places

Errorless after Communion.

In her rare low moods

She remembers the next five days as twelve

And compares an unheard of number of things

To be abreast of the incurable

Having no choice but to return

To the end of thought.

In the evenings I can switch the light on from indoors

To illuminate the shroud

Of irises over the urn of jasmine.

Medbh McGuckian currently teaches in Belfast at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry and her last collection was called My Love Has Fared Inland published by Peter Fallon Gallery Press, County Meath.

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