Issue 11: November 2005
Lara Frankena | Sandra Greaves | Jen Hadfield | David Hale | Paul Perry | Philip Wilson
PAUL PERRY
Ode to a Car Crash
part of the field
it breathes at night
moves a grassy beast
home of grub and worm
victory for wild things
a vision of the future
imagine the driver concussed
thrown from the vehicle
bewildered intoxicated
walking away from the site
the midden now
with a shake of the head
and a dismissive wave of the hand
years later the doors
are rusted unrecognizable
the wheels are gone
but the other driver
shadow driver ghost driver
some days in the night light
you'll find him still
clutching the steering wheel
as if he could take the vehicle
from danger at the crucial last moment
other days he's smoking a cigarette
invisible in the dusty sunshine
as a couple from the city
resettle into the countryside
circling his car's altar
he can never seem to leave it
he has the resigned look of the damned
not that he does not care
for his small cemetery
a caretaker a gardener of sorts
the soil grows the car sinks further
the ants make it home
a scrawny white cat hides from the rain
some days two teenagers kiss
in the back seat
the ghost driver watches shaking his head
but what can he do
the boot is full of old clothes
but nothing goes to waste
one beggar who found the calamity
took himself a coat he still wears today
before long … what's in a lifetime
the engine is removed
transplanted to another vehicle
at least part of it
one which swerves its way
around corners in another county
the doors are taken
the seats removed
the glass is spread like fallow seed
its only contribution
to the growth
a glimmer and twitch of light
one day when the surviving driver
turns this bend again he shivers
the car he can't recognize
doesn't see it's submerged
the memory is faint was it here
what turns his blood cold
and pushes his foot
onto the accelerator
is the man standing like a negative
all light on the side of the road
as if he had been waiting
like an old friend
his arm outstretched his thumb
pointing all the way to eternity
The Gate to Mulcahy's Farm
The gate to Mulcahy's farm is crooked,
sinking into infirm soil like a ship
from the Spanish Armada if you like,
forged and felled in some dark cave
to find itself jaded with flaking eroded gilt
leaving the striations, prison-like,
shaded a coppery green. A gate without
a handle and unlike all others in any
neighbouring field without the dull sanguine
frame that swing to and fro like a hinge,
or a door itself to some other world.
No, this is no ordinary gate and there is
something majestic in its stolid refusal
to swing, something absurd even.
Perhaps this is another version of heaven,
imagine the bedroom it might once have graced,
this brass headboard, this discarded,
transported remnant of love's playground,
and look, two golden and intact globes
rest on either end, both transcendental transmitters,
receivers maybe of rough magic,
piebald love, communicating not sleep,
sleep no more, but wake, wake here
to the earth and imagine if you want
the journey of such an armature
of fecund passion, what hands gripped
these bars, what prayers were murmured
through the grate of this ribald cagery?
Imagine too the man who must have
hurled and pitched and stabbed
this frame into the ground, in a dark rain of course
after his wife had died, her passing to us unknown
though you know this
that there must have been some act
of violence within this frame-work,
some awful, regrettable pattern caught
in the form of what, wind rushing through a brass
headboard, an exclamation point to the querulous
division of fields, could we be talking border-country,
and the broken, airy, moss-eaten stone walls.
Think about when the farmer died and the farm
was sold, think about what happened the field, empty
of its cows, still with its stones and grey soil,
maybe this is Monaghan,
maybe some day it, the brass headboard
you are looking at now, will be sold
to an antiquarian in a Dublin shop,
brought there on a traveler's horse and cart,
not smelted down or disassembled, but sold
to a shop where some lady with a wallet
will buy the thing, the elegant shabbery before you
that is the gate to Mulcahy's farm. As for the bed
itself, we can speculate, let it have sunken
into the earth, or better still let the earth be the bed,
the cot, mattress and berth to this sinking headboard,
this beautiful incongruous reliquary of misplaced passion.
Paul Perry was born in Dublin in 1972. He won the Hennessy New
Irish Writer of the Year
Award in 1998. Currently, he is Writer in Residence for the University of
Ulster. His first
book was The Drowning of the Saints (Salmon). Wintering, his
second, is published
by the Dedalus Press in 2006.
Available from Amazon.co.uk: The Drowning of the Saints (Salmon, 2003).