Fifty Words Crossing
the Atlantic mind
numbing desire to be
in another position
the imposition
that I am other
is what gnarls
me, a violent shade
of scorched thrumming
I am an alien
Armagnac, earthy
and unappreciated, inebriated
Is it yourself that’s in it?
Certainly! Hardly ever
the true answer.
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Crave
6,000 miles is nothing
that can rip the pitchfork
hunger I have for your body
from my clenching hands. Words
fall like stony soil between
the wasting space of this impalement,
this desire to be the forever
innocent throat for your insatiable growl. Why
do I crave this silencing
violence of another tongue
making meat of my own?
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Calving
As a child I was walking alone
to school or home,
I can’t recall
if it was early morning or late
afternoon for the sky was bruised
with the vague comings or goings
of the world’s self into self;
it was always time of rain arriving
on the coast, our misty edge . . .
My memory is crystal
shattered by my reaching
the crest of the hill
between our house and Malloy’s;
I saw him through the rough bramble,
his dark green Wellington boots glistening
like my exposed face
and I stood perfectly
still, mind moving
closer, my widening eyes, my heart
thumping as his two huge hands
pulled at two little legs
a steaming body surely emerging
through what I now heard,
the terrifying sound of life
separating from itself,
the fathomless echo of consciousness
born in a moment
that is almost incredible,
that is terrific, every moment is
motionless and quiet, becoming
a memory that speaks
now in everything.
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Coda
Perhaps it is not about taming
the language, but rather trusting
the mouth of the river; the flow of the mind
is not to be easily tempered. Speech
is a construct, an artifact, not an essential
revelation. We are tangled in the weavings
of even our most elegant words. We scratch
at the scabs of our efforts to love one another,
to remake the world. We plot ideas,
the instruments of our glory, intangible,
only to find we arrive and arrive
without end. Language is innocent—wordless
we are equally empty. Silence? Perhaps we think
it would hurt less, but would it scorch even more
to feel the pointlessness and be
ignorant of the music we could make?
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Catherine Murphy is a graduate of the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Transfer, Bombay Gin, and Sidebrow. She was the Spring 2008 recipient of the Mark Linenthal Award in poetry, and received an Honorable Mention in the 2010 Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize.
Her study of race and gender in British performance poetry, “Performing, Transforming, and Changing the Question: Patience Agbabi-Poet Enough” was published in Intimate Exposure: Essays on the Public-Private Divide in British Poetry since 1950. (Eds Emily Taylor Merriman and Adrian Grafe, McFarland Press, 2010).
Originally from Ireland, Murphy graduated from the National University of Ireland, Galway with a BA and an MA in Sociology and Politics and publications from her previous life as a political scientist include “Environmental Policy in Ireland” (with George Taylor) in Issues in Irish Public Policy (Ed George Taylor, Irish Academic Press, 2002). She has taught strategic reading in after school programs for children and young adults and is currently teaching a poetry workshop with homeless children. Murphy lives in San Francisco and her poetry can be found online at Loveandotherstds.blogspot.com