Ted McCarthy is a poet and translator living in Clones, Ireland. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada and Australia. He has had two collections published: November Wedding, and Beverly Downs.
SUGAR CUBE
There is no thirteenth floor where they sit
watching the river carve its way to the wetlands
past warehouses that could be the ghosts of mills,
their streaked walls the pale
sludge of used salt,
past brown broken chains
perpetually swaying where tide and current meet,
but soundlessly. A sudden burst of laughter;
a woman puts a sugar cube on her ring finger,
shows it to the company
then drops it in brandy.
A scrape of sharp on sweet,
someone glimpses themselves in a far mirror,
looks away hurriedly. A waitress hovers,
nervous beside an empty table. Lateness
descends; the galaxy
is screened by muffled lights,
night’s arrival merely
a fact on a clock-face. T
ime is glacial,
the drip of ice on the far side of the world,
a mountain inching every hundred years
along an unplumbed line,
and life the cheerful
course of wine through veins;
since we, of all creatures, must make our own
certainty, ruby in warm light will suffice
for the here and now, all a matter of tone:
aromas, clink of glass,
the soft glow of a face
hunched over an iPhone
straight from seventeenth century chiaroscuro.
The pianist plays – will you still love me tomorrow? –
but almost mute, as if to reassure that nothing
can possibly go wrong,
and as the notes elide,
boats shift with the tide
but rest secure at anchor. The great shoals
sleep at the centre, vigilant at the edge,
night has the rhythmic breath of well-fed cattle,
soft rustle of sedge.
And here the hour spills
over at last; restlessness, the bill,
the room clears with vague promises to keep
intact the evening, carry it about
as if it were a charm or amulet,
and the sugar lady yawns,
she and her company lingering on
as if afraid to sleep.
AN ARCTIC FRONT
A walk before dark. Still, icy air,
footpaths the old begin to fear.
Under a looming, cliff-like sky
windows are cardboard cut-outs.
Greyhounds stabled, the evening paper spread
on the kitchen table, news flickering in the corner.
Familiar doors, knocked once for a dare,
life glimpsed in the fleeing,
unchanged it seems, a domesticity
set as a silhouette
but for the bank of wilderness
climbing toward the church,
briars bent in great bows under the weight
of their own vitality,
the simplicity and energy of the rank
pressing down on the tired. For such
is a town at some unforeseen hour of its life,
like the slowing, the silting of a river,
or a pause for a shortened breath
in air that can go no further; which sits,
clear, pure, tight, but is a kind of smog
befuddling the will to see beyond the chill;
where nothing exists but the inevitable,
where it is too late to rejoice
in the past life of the knocked, the derelict.
Not yet. Life like an Arctic front is merely pausing,
someone will pick up the stones that have tumbled
from the old wall and set them back
not out of love, but for something to do,
someone for whom a useless wall
is a novelty, a pair of eyes
free of the burden of history
who sees empty spaces for what they are,
a gap of air, silent, mild, unhaunted.
