Sinéad Morrissey Poems

In my dream the dead have arrived
to wash the windows of my house.
There are no blinds to shut them out with.
...

Hyde Park, 1936. Cold enough for scarves and hats
among the general populace, but not for the fifteen thousand women
from the League of Health and Beauty performing callisthenics
on the grass. It could be snowing, and they of Bromley‐Croydon,
...

A soldier returned from a war
was how my P6 spelling book put it: I saw
cripples with tin cans for coins
in dusty scarlet, back from some spat of Empire.
...

In other noises, I hear my children crying -
in older children playing on the street
past bedtime, their voices buoyant
in the staggered light; or in the baby
...

That their days were not like our days,
the different people who lived in sepia -

more buttoned, colder, with slower wheels,
shut off, sunk back in the unwakeable house

for all we call and knock. And even the man
with the box and the flaming torch

who made his servants stand so still
their faces itched can't offer us what it cost

to watch the foreyard being lost
to cream and shadow, the pierced sky

placed in a frame. Irises under the windowsill
were the colour of Ancient Rome.
...

This garden is so empty of time it holds me still, unable to go on.
I blame the leaves: they fell from the sky in such a wild, golden rain
They pulled me in, to see them thigh-deep over flowers and graves
That had been stamped with names and dates, faith and pain,
Like flags on sinking ships. No more years to go by, all whos
And wheres washed out in nature's fire, the only death here
Is Autumn's, and she does it too well. The trees' bold undoing
Is no serious grief, but an accomplishment of practice.
I wonder what faces the graves will have
When Winter is here, and her show is over.
...

I took it down two years ago, but he still comes knocking.
There was too much space in him.
I gave him everything on the outside -
The long curve of my spine; arms, feet, thighs.
He was the actor and director of his own imagination,
Dying for every exterior. The moving
Crown of my head was the rising star in his heaven.

Never whole and never alone, I got to wanting it
Without the sight of it. No show, no reflection -
Not even in his eyes, which were so outside of himself,
So beside himself, so down on every last cell of himself -
I craved for nothing but blind discretion.
He stands on my doorstep, pleading his lost barbiturate,
But the mirror is in the outhouse. I promise cobwebs, whitewash.
...

My father's in my fingers, but my mother's in my palms.
I lift them up and look at them with pleasure -
I know my parents made me by my hands.

They may have been repelled to separate lands,
to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,
but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.

With nothing left of their togetherness but friends
who quarry for their image by a river,
at least I know their marriage by my hands.

I shape a chapel where a steeple stands.
And when I turn it over,
my father's by my fingers, my mother's by my palms

demure before a priest reciting psalms.
My body is their marriage register.
I re-enact their wedding with my hands.

So take me with you, take up the skin's demands
for mirroring in bodies of the future.
I'll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.
We know our parents make us by our hands.
...

You think it ugly: drawing lines with a knife
Down the backs of those writers we exist to dislike. But it's life.

One is disadvantaged by illustrious company
Left somehow undivided. Divide it with animosity.

Don't be proud -
Viciousness in poetry isn't frowned on, it's allowed.

Big fish in a big sea shrink proportionately.
Stake out your territory

With stone walls, steamrollers, venomous spit
From the throat of a luminous nightflower. Gerrymander it.
...

The clocks do all the talking. He visits the grave in the middle of a three hour loop
and knows the year of completion of every castle in Ireland, His route
is always the same: the round tower via the aqueduct via the cemetery via the ramparts
via the Battle of Antrim during the Rising of the United Irishmen in 1798,
the slaughter of which is more present if he's deep in the morning
of his April wedding breakfast or locked into the moment they fitted the oxygen mask
and she rolled her bruised eyes back. She is unable to find the stop for the bus to Belfast
and stays indoors. The nets turn the daylight white and empty.
She has worn the married life of her sister so tightly
over her own, the noise of the clocks makes her feel almost without skin.
Sometimes she sits in her sister's chair, and feels guilty.
She has Countdown for company and a selective memory -
the argument at the funeral with her niece over jewellry and, years ago,
the conspiracy to keep her single, its success. Time settles over each afternoon
like an enormous wing, when the flurry of lunchtime has left them
and the plates have already been set for tea. He reads extensively -
from Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives, to Why Ireland Starved -
but has taken to giving books away recently to anyone who calls.
Winter or summer, evenings end early: they retire to their separate rooms
at least two hours before sleep. It falls like an act of mercy
when the twenty-two clocks chime eight o'clock in almost perfect unison.
...