Morning on Montpelier

Then there is the morning
when the Mourne Mountains
are a gift, strafing the horizon
like a Shangri La north of Dublin

with its saucer bay,
tauter than plastic
where toy ferries ply their trade
to all points east.
No matter that a front
approaches stealthily,
that this crisp dry air
will moisten again, the wind pick up,
that in Kilmashogue
the slabs will re-arrange
yet again and spell out
the word of the season;
for this moment, at least,
mud pools are diamante,
a jay flutes through conifers,
a crow’s signature flourishes in air.

+

Sibyl at the Rockefeller

A strange choice for guide,
this four foot, seventy-plus dryad
of skyscrapers.
Powder applied chaotically,
feather boa, red shoes, more suited to
the Rainbow Room 65 floors up
than this rain-dashed street.

Like her sister in the Harbour,
she grasps her book of truth
but relies on memory it seems,
the small child gazing up
as men ate sandwiches mid-air,
resting on tight-roped steel.
The Irish (and the Indians)
had the best heads for height.

She leads us onwards,
voice magnified through earphones
thoughtfully supplied at the desk.
Her constant injunction is not
not to look back but to look up
at machine-cut design,
the glories of chrome escalators,
art deco elevators,
the tiger’s eye in black marble.

And all the while she intones her litany:
the ambition of Junior, of Hood,
the vision of Lee Lawrie and Frank Brangwyn,
we tut at the crimes of Diego Rivera.

Come to a halt behind Atlas;
we look through his legs at the Gothic
dropped-out of the sky squat of St Pats,
attempt to spot the familiar
in the bent frame, arms transfixed.
Others have guessed wrong
(Batman, the Terminator);
she smiles as you conjure Christ
from those tortured limbs.

We paid for an hour;
she gives us 90 minutes
before a startled glance,
a shy exchange of tips –
my five dollar bill outdone
by her ‘Go to the river, the only way
to see the place is from the water’ –
and she’s gone, her minute form
drowned by crowds
streaming beneath the city.

+

Portrait of the Artist’s Father

Years ago when I was young
and hadn’t lost anyone,
I wrote about a sketch a poet made
of his dying mother.
Cool, disapproving words:
those tidy coal-strokes of the dead
Now, what else is there to do
as I sit and watch you sleep
one of your countless
dress rehearsals?
Eyes shut but darting constantly,
lids pulsing with each twitch
as you fight the demon of the hour.

I trawl for metaphors,
imagine corollaries
for the fluid filling your lungs,
some dark assailant
emerging from the shade,
hands flexed.

Your mouth works wordlessly,
offers no clues.
You may be reading from another script,
borrowed, perhaps, from the thriller
you’ve taken weeks to read.

My page
has been empty
for months.
Forgive me
for filling it.

+++

Nessa O’Mahony was born, and lives, in Dublin, Ireland where she works as a freelance teacher and writer. Her poetry has appeared in a number of Irish, UK, and North American periodicals and has been translated into several European languages. She has published three books to date: Bar Talk (Italics Press, 1999), Trapping a Ghost (Bluechrome Publishing, 2005) and In Sight of Home (Salmon Poetry, 2009).

O’Mahony won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards the same year. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland literature bursary in 2004, a Simba Gill Fellowship in 2005 and an artists’ bursary from South Dublin County Council in 2007. She completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Bangor University in 2007. In 2008-09, she was Artist in Residence at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at UCD. She is associate editor of UK literary journal, Orbis.