MICHAEL DONAGHY
Glass
This is a cheapjack gift at the year's end.
This is a double-glazing hymn for wind.
This is a palm frond held out to a friend
Who holds her lifeline lightly in her hand.
As fine sand filaments the unclenched hand
Or leaves the palm grit-filmed but crazed, lines end
Across prismatic windscreens. Every friend
A meteorologist's diagram of wind.
Blow smoke into the fist of either hand
And pull it tight and loop it round the end
Of every night held up by wine and friend,
Sootflecked and leaning on a London wind.
Then say our ribboned smoke's erased by wind,
Our glass is sand. You start, but in the end,
Somehow, I stay. You stay, somehow, my friend
Who grips me tightest in her open hand.
Liverpool
Ever been tattooed? It takes a whim of iron,
takes sweating in the antiseptic-stinking parlour,
nothing to read but motorcycle magazines
before the blood-sopped cotton, and, of course, the needle,
all for — at best — some Chinese dragon.
But mostly they do hearts,
hearts skewered, blurry, spurting like the Sacred Heart
on the arms of bikers and sailors.
Even in prison they get by with biro ink and broken glass,
carving hearts into their arms and shoulders.
But women's are more intimate. They hide theirs,
under shirts and jeans, in order to bestow them.
Like Tracy, who confessed she'd had hers done
one legless weekend with her ex.
Heart. Arrow. Even the bastard's initials, R.J.L.
somewhere where it hurt, she said,
and when I asked her where, snapped 'Liverpool'.
Wherever it was, she'd had it sliced away
leaving a scar, she said, pink and glassy
but small, and better than having his mark on her,
that self-same mark of Valentinus,
who was flayed for love, but who never
— so the cardinals now say — existed.
Desanctified, apocryphal, like Christopher,
like the scar you never showed me, Trace,
your ( ), your ex, your 'Liverpool'.
Still, when I unwrap the odd anonymous note
I let myself believe that it's from you.
From Dances Learned Last Night: Poems 1975-1995 (Picador, 2000)
Also available from Amazon.co.uk:
Conjure (Picador, 2000)