Issue 18: Mary Noonan

Apollonian

So here you are, in Palma de Mallorca, in Bunker’s,

the cool bistrot named for the god-like surfer

who bailed in Malibu at the age of twenty-eight,

couldn’t ride the wave of his father’s sugar millions.

But all of that is very far from both of you, sitting

opposite your teenagers – a girl and a boy,

olive-skinned, strong-boned. Are you on holiday?

You stare, wide-eyed, and smile while they

do all the talking, their dark brows moving

in waves of knowledge and humour. Delicate

and tough, they look made for the new world –

already, they know more than you, though

they don’t know what a tightrope act it was

to deliver them and their mother-of-pearl spines –

once fragile as spun sugar, or linnets’ throats –

to this table. And they don’t know if they in turn

will have to hoist your old bones on their backs

and hike across a mountain pass to safety, or

how far they will have to travel on without you.

What’s it like to be looking into the radiant disks

of these Apollonian faces, reflecting you and

your parents and glimmers of the ancestors

who survived, the man who had to let go

of a small boy’s hand, watch him slip into the deep

as he tried to swim against the eddying vortex,

or the woman who, starving, followed a procession

of ants and raided their store of grain in order to

feed her family? All of that, pressing for a hearing

beneath the silken skin of these, your flawless children.

Letter to Cal

Well, I suppose no-one’s heart is good

for much till it’s been smashed to bits.

But no more doctors, I’m going to get

my repair work done at the doll hospital

from now on. I’m exhausted all over, but

particularly the face, which must come from

wearing a horrible fixed grin for so long.

I’ve put some Arden lotion in the ice-box

and am looking forward to lying down and

putting a nice cold washcloth full of it on

my poor hypocritical features. I wish

you’d come. We could go bone-fishing.

They’re the greatest fish there is – very small.

You have to pole through the mangrove keys

silently. And in June, there’s tarpon –

that’s moonlight night-fishing. Ravishing

but hard to catch. The Polish girl and a boy

from the hotel are teaching me pool,

such a useful thing to know. And Sunday

I’m going to the cockfights. But I do wish

someone would ask me to go to the races –

I’m dying to. Thank you so much for the

“Glass Eye and Supplies”. Only you know

how fond I am of glass eyes.

I used to have relatives with glass eyes when

I was small, and for some reason I worried

because I thought they wouldn’t go to Heaven.

I don’t think I was ever fully reassured.

When you write my epitaph, you must say

I was the loneliest person who ever lived.

Still Life with Pigeons

I

The nude statues on rue du Faubourg St Denis – she holding a full-blown globe, he a crescent moon – had a ball of blood-smeared feathers at their feet when I snapped them with my iphone. And a couple of feral pigeons lay on their backs behind a plate-glass shop-front on rue de Belleville as I walked by, bird sinew mixed with the dust of cinder-blocks, toppled pillars. How did they  come to be inside for the swing of the wrecking-ball, the thump of the sledgehammer, doomed to lie framed, side-by-side, under plaster-of–Paris snow?

II

Pigeons are dying in this city. My apartment looks onto a gable-end that does not show French windows with pelmets of wrought-iron fleur-de-lys. Instead, biscuit-cutter apertures puncture concrete, like judas spy-holes. I watch the pigeons fidget on the ledges, the building become columbarium, with nest-holes for the breeding and fattening of squabs. But this is no rubblestone dovecote, hub of hectic production for the tables of abbots and barons. The block is more reliquarium, mausoleum for the housing of ashes.

III

The bird deaths are getting to me. Last night you flambeed chicken breasts in cognac, added red wine, silky shallots and button mushrooms. We stripped the coq au vin of its chocolate-brown robes, and later your lips moved over my limbs, prolonging the fleshy feast. But I’m not a collared – or a turtle – dove! Not a chicken, in the spring of its short life, nor a lone swallow flying back to Capestrano! I’m too young to have my small neck ruffed by a pigeonhole or my bones picked clean; too young to be pulverised for the cinerary jars of the columbarium; too young to lie frozen beside my mate, behind glass

Mary Noonan's first collection, The Fado House  (Dedalus Press, 2012), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and the Strong/Shine Award. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Literature Bursary in 2014. Father, a limited edition pamphlet, was published by Bonnefant Press in 2015. She is the current poetry editor of Southword Journal.

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