Tinteán

AFTER MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL
After her funeral, we filled black bin bags
with her clothes and shoes,
readied for crude and random dispersal.
Her walking stick poked through the plastic.

Newspaper was wrapped, slapdash, around
her thick mugs and delicate china;
her forks and knives and buckled saucepans clattered,
anonymously, in cardboard boxes, marked ‘kitchen.’

The house was skinned raw with the cold,
none of us had her skill with  fire.
Outside the fading whine
of traffic echoed desolate in the distance.

We huddled, adult sons and daughters,
unmoored, listless as strays,
fearful of the random terrors of the road,
the hit and miss of chance, the casual blows of happenstance.

ANGELS

Duffy’s Circus: one night only, transient and vagabond.
The teacher lost us by lunch-time, even her snide remarks
about the half-crown entry fee didn’t matter.

Slapstick and clowning lifted us,
tricks of deftness mesmerised as we followed
the juggler’s toss and catch,
his hold of things in whirl and balance.

But when the ringmaster cracked his whip for the trapeze artists
we gasped at these beauties in sequinned leotards,
aerialists who’d spin and swing from stratospheric heights,
hang from their ankles, defy gravity and fly
like angels above us in a canvas sky.

As the orchestra drum-rolled the tension,
we peeped through lattice fingers,
feared our angels might fall,
all their precise timing, their nerve and judgement
thudding into the safety net,
held for them by the stay-rope men,
ordinary chaps who willed them on, as we did,
to the heights we’d never scale.

TWO MEN AT THE CINEMA

Every Wednesday, he took the Basildon Bond writing pad,
his fountain pen and ink from the biscuit tin,
to compose his order for the taxi man and grocer,
Jimmy Costigan of Barrack Street, Cahir.

In formal prose he detailed his unvarying list:
PG tips tea, Calvita cheese and always several bars of chocolate,
to be delivered to his house on Saturday evening
after which he’d need a lift to Clonmel to the pictures,
and ask  that the taxi man oblige him with his company.
He’d sign off ‘yours in anticipation,’ and end
with the full expanse of his signature, Thomas  F. Cahill.

In the plush dark of the cinema,
this shy, reclusive man rode out with the drunken Sherriff to El Dorado
understood why the lawman took to the drink
when the saloon girl left town.
Wept for his loss.

Each week, as he huddled into the back seat of the Zephyr,
he’d remind Jimmy to look out
for the usual letter, detailing his modest food order;
mention his standing request to hire the car,
the destination, long established.

Margaret Galvin is a Tipperary poet living in Wexford. She is a former Editor of Ireland’s Own. Her poetry and prose are regularly broadcast on RTE National radio on ‘Sunday Miscellany’ and ‘A Word in Edgeways.’ She has published six collections of work . Her poetry has previously been published in Tinteán. It was described by Dr Frances Glass, University of Melbourne as ‘gritty and unsentimental.’