Maatstaf. Jaargang 38

Michael o'Loughlin
Gedichten

Death of a Poet

‘der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland’
- Paul Celan

Why did I find it so hard to talk to you?
It wasn't just your deafness, or my own
smirking guilt at being at home in this age.
No, it was something more. We disagreed
on nothing of importance, but I hated your life
hated your house arrest in your own survival.

[p. 66]

 

I didn't want to believe your life could happen

 

because it offered no room for redress

 

- and I was too Irish to go that naked.

 

Often, you mentioned the Mayor of Cork,

 

how as a youth in Haarlem you followed

 

his hunger strike, his slow descent into victory.

 

McSw-ee-ney or McSw-eye-ney, you always asked

 

with the attentiveness of the autodidact.

 

But of course I never knew. On dark mornings,

 

descending the stairs in the coffin-narrow house,

 

I would hear your brisk shuffle in the study

 

already haunting your own books, and I thought:

 

it has always been like this. Just once,

 

at a party, you angular with alcohol

 

spouting Hölderlin to some German girl,

 

I glimpsed you as you must have been -

 

blond, bony adolescent in love with that

 

language's deadly mirror, those black waves

 

soon to break in your ears, and your diamond boss's

 

comic despair, sending you out

 

to write poems in the café at the corner.

 

After, you built a house in the dunes

 

and kept your eyes fixed on the sea

 

your ears pinned like butterflies.

 

That curious stance of yours...

 

shoulders bent, head raised expectant.

 

Even then, in those '50s photos with your daughters

 

I see how you were pointed elsewhere. Even then,

 

you were waiting, with what patience,

 

with what longing, you were waiting

 

for the angel to return and kiss your heart to ash.

[p. 67]

Afterimages

I looked out the kitchen window
down into the street
and the eyes
of a neighbour woman
being carried on a stretcher
into her house to die.

The women were hoisting you
onto the couch
when our eyes met:
that this could happen
to any mother's son!
That even Groucho Marx
was a member of this club!

Eve's belly
was smooth as a wheatfield,
rope of nothingness
snaking through the eyes.

That night, we played
all the Requiems we had:
Verdi, Brahms, Mozart...
at each record's centre
the navel of death.

I thought of the black whore
I saw in Amsterdam
framed in her allegorical window
shining like polished darkness,
how her Day-Glo purple girdle
gorged the light.

[p. 68]

Dublin

Broken and sad as dusk in an Asian city
an Orientalist landscape
crookedly hung on a concrete wall.

You have half-forgotten your lovers' names.
You married a boor and built a hurdle
your children couldn't jump.

You will not recognise them
prefer to watch your decay in the mirror
a stranger to yourself

a displaced person from wars
fought on your streets, wandering
in the world's washed-up trash.

Your buildings collapse like Berlin
in slow motion: your wall is still intact
and sometimes visible.

Out of your dead meteorite heart
the suburbs are scattered like rubble
a no-man's-land between tenses

barbarians at the gates of Rome
hiding behind the names
of rustic villages.

Your children are all exiles
whether they stay or go:
in your mad microclimate

the heart swears allegiance to nothing
but the palm trees swaying
in freezing rain.