Issue 12: June 2006

Julia Bird | Jane Holland | Gregory Leadbetter | Andrew O'Donnell | Adam O'Riordan | Camellia Stafford

ADAM O'RIORDAN

Small Adult Skull

The dome I hold is an empty cathedral
in the minim rest at an organist's rehearsal.

No clues here to a life
however the shadow-play
of my anglepoise might
attempt to aggregate a face,
feign grief, surprise, delight.

It waits like a glass box
in a bankrupt jeweller's.

This monotony of bone
is a snapshot of the moon.
I turn it through its cycle,
feel its pull: from swaddling
-cloth to specimen case.

I contemplate it for hours on end.
Still it gives up not the briefest song.

 

NGC3949

is a galaxy in Ursa Major whose formation mirrors, almost exactly, that of our own.

Back from the perforated dark and growing distance
Hubble's milky image brings us to ourselves.

The echo pitched up from the moss-wet well.
A lover's shape, that indelible stain on the iris.

(Years down the line, you swear blind
the cut and sway of a dark form is her.

Neon dazzles the rain-slick street
as you wave away the cab and push

back down through the crowd into the bar;
pilot charting the wrong star by candle light,

leagues off course, the face, of course, is another's.)
In this spiral galaxy the arms embrace the core.

Not her, or your idea of her, or ever will be.
It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is.

Trawling

The tiniest stress fracture
could stop the satellite
as it travels like a Trappist
in silence through the vacuum's detritus;
carbon-carbon, a C116-A solar panel.
But it goes on. We bounce ideas off it,
it spreads the word

of a cloud bank sixty leagues out
from a small African republic
struggling with insurgency and pandemic,
a Captain announces they'll fly above it.
A grandmother presses her cold nose
to the porthole but cannot make out
the rocking horse of the lonely trawler below;

the smell of spilt diesel, fish guts,
blood and brine, gravity in flux,
a coffee cup slides along the galley,
its thick dregs are J M W Turner's
Snowstorm: Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth.

 

Adam O'Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982 and read English at Oxford University. He studied poetry under Andrew Motion at the University of London and was awarded the inaugural Peters, Fraser and Dunlop poetry prize. He currently works part-time for the publisher Enitharmon and as a tutor. In 2006, he was awarded an ACE writer's bursary.