Issue 3: September 2003
Rhian Gallagher | A.B. Jackson | John McAuliffe | Jane Routh | Sarah Wardle
JOHN McAULIFFE
Action
It is 3 a.m., on a wet night, and I'm stood
In the middle of a field,
Listening to The Open Mind, a repeat, on a walkman
When Corman with his wand and loudspeaker cone
Directs me, "Hey you," and then the long arm,
To walk across the field,
And to wade into the river
With the boom close to the water.
This is experience and I need experience.
Today's Imperative
after Horace's Ode 1:7
Others have herblife, bogland, the bird sanctuary.
Or manmade canals and urban decay.
And they have international flights of fancy too:
But wherever they go,
It all looks and sounds the same to me,
Mountains, some work, a nice sunrise that none of the other tourists sees
Or an epiphany that signals a deeper
Engagement with the local patois / native literature.
Then there are the argonauts
Who labour in the interstices of a language, or two at most;
And that crowd whose ambition is to introduce gender
To the reader who hasn't got one on her:
Long warm-ups, agreed movements from a to b, and put up the shutters
With a lyrical turn or various littleknown fabrics and figures,
Such as you often find in those who use family detail as glitter
To stud the rough black rock of their fictions.
And I like all this, but
It doesn't live in me, it doesn't wake me up in my skin at night.
I'd rather sing to you about what's imperative,
So, listen. Take your mind off the stresses and anxiety of life
And whether you're in a southern town
Like Cork or Montpellier, or even Washington or Rome,
Go pour yourself a glass of wine.
Now. Imagine the kind of man who trusts himself to fortune
And says: "Let us go wherever it takes us.
We've heard that a better life awaits us and we've seen worse.
Today, banish worry, exile it, the night's young now
And soon we'll be back to the grind, in fact, maybe tomorrow . . ."
North Brunswick Street Lullaby
When the sirens don't blast the air,
When they've put out the fire
And broken up the break-in and the melee,
Then the passing traffic sounds like the sea
Saying hush uselessly to the crowds
On the streets, who're out of their heads,
Who're seeing different things in the same light,
Who won't stop telling everyone about
The taxis having it sewn up altogether,
The next big thing who's a Cavan boxer,
The latest cheapest one-way ticket west,
The boyfriend's new girlfriend's bad conscience,
That song, the song you've never heard,
That goes something like this.
John McAuliffe moved from Cork to London last year: since then he has published poems and reviews in Metre, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, the TLS and the online journal west47.
First collection available from Amazon.co.uk: A Better Life (Gallery Press, 2002).