Issue 9: March 2005

Ian Duhig | Annie Freud | Mark Granier | Heather Holden | John Stammers | Matthew Sweeney

MATTHEW SWEENEY

The Ice Hotel

I'm going back to the ice hotel,
this time under a false name
as I need to stay there again.

I'll stand in the entrance hall,
marvelling at this year's design,
loving the way it can't be the same

because ice melts and all here is ice —
the walls, the ceiling, the floor,
the seats in the lobby, the bed.

Not that I lay on naked ice,
but on the skins of reindeers,
piled high, as on a sled.

First, though, I went to the bar —
no beer, only vodka —
and I met my sculptor there,

or I should say, my ice sculptor
whose pieces were on display
in every room in the ice hotel,

and who told me his name was Thor.
We stood in that ice-blue light
swapping whisper after whisper,

drinking vodka after vodka
till we agreed to go to bed,
and neither of us slept that night.

Let me tell you about that bed —
ice pillars, two foot high,
each with a lit candle on top,

and wedged in the middle of each
the four corners of an ice sheet
three, maybe four, inches thick.

On this the pelts were laid,
then the Polar Survival bag
that the two of us climbed inside.

Next morning, over Arctic Char,
he offered me any sculpture
but which could I take home?

And I didn't want to go home
but I went. Now I'm going back —
back to the latest ice hotel

with its blue ice, its silence,
its flickering candlelight,
its sculptures I can claim.

The UFO

A UFO landed in Ireland in '54,
in Donegal, in my back garden.
At the controls was my grandfather,
and not wanting his craft to be seen,
he had a house built around it,
or he added bricks to the turfhouse
till his spaceship had a coat
and no earthly visitor could guess
that alien splendour was there.
I was two when it landed
but I can just about remember.
I can hear the noise it made —
a humming that scared me,
as if it might take off again,
scattering bricks everywhere,
taking my grandfather away,
but he walked into the house
and switched the lights on —
no need for paraffin and matches,
just a bulb hanging there
like our own small moon,
and this was repeated in every room,
and a copper kettle boiled
away from the fire,
and my grandfather took me
out to the turfhouse
to see the thing being fed,
but I closed my eyes
stuck my fingers in my ears,
and cried.

In the Dust

And then in the dust he drew a face,
the face of a woman, and he asked
the man drinking whiskey beside him
if he'd ever seen her, or knew who she was,
all the time staring down at her, as if
this would make her whole. And then,
at the shake of the head, he let his boot
dissolve her into a settling cloud.
He threw another plank on the fire,
drained his glass and filled it again,
watching his dog rise to its feet
and start to growl at the dirt-road
that stretched, empty, to a hilly horizon.
A shiver coincided with the dog's first bark,
that doubled, trebled, became gunfire
that stopped nothing coming, so he stood
to confront it, but not even a wind
brushed his face, no shape formed,
and after the dog went quiet, a hand
helped him sit down and rejoin his glass.

Sanctuary

Stay awhile. Don't go just yet.
The sirens are roaming the streets,
the stabbing youths are out in packs,
there's mayhem in the tealeaves.
You're much better off staying here.
I have a Bordeaux you'll like,
let's open it. (I've a second bottle, too.)
And a goat's cheese to fast for,
and a blue from the Vale of Cashel —
and the source of the bread stays secret.
Was I expecting you to stay?
No, I always eat like this.
Hear that — wasn't it a gunshot?
Come closer, turn the music up.
Maybe we should dim the lights.
Let's clink our glasses to each other
if no better toast comes to mind.
I told you you'd ooh! at the cheese —
here, have some more. A top up?
You're the kind of girl I like.
Listen, that was definitely a bomb.
Maybe the civil war has started,
the one they've all been promising.
Well, there's nowhere to go now,
so let's kill the lights and retire.

From Sanctuary (Cape 2004)

Also available: Selected Poems (Cape, 2002)