Amairgin Poetry (4)

I love my Pimlico girl and she loves me.

I saw her beside the Regent’s Canal,
haloed by early morning sunbeams,
a modern day Madonna,
reading La Peste.

I straightened a crooked Gauloise,
and mingled words with smoky
rive-gauche poise,

‘pardon, mais j’adore Camus, ‘Sisyphe’ surtout.’

‘would you imagine Sisyphus happy?’

‘don’t ask me. how should I know?’

pondering a weighty response
I stroked my chin.

she broke the tumbleweed silence,
‘smoke?’
I lit a cigarette
passed it to her.

we stared at the canal,
its green-ink water
and swans at swim
and smoked.

she whispered softly,

‘if only love itself was enough.’

the swans serened from view.

she sighed,

‘I admire their fidelity,
how they mate for life…
procreate…

we are strangers,
but could be lovers,
sharing a discreet ‘affaire’
au milieu de la crudité
of this desparate city.’

‘was that soliloquy aimed at me?’

I dredged a misquote out of memory,
‘we are all strangers – estranged from ourselves.’

she flicked her Gauloise into the stream,

‘then, let’s be strangers no more -
great works can be born on street-corners
and restaurants’ revolving doors,
and great loves may spring
from towpath chance encounters…’

we took a bus to Pimlico,
walked, hand in hand,
labyrinthine streets
to a discreet mews retreat.

she led me up a spiral staircase
across a neat-trimmed patio patch
through a tight door
into a bijou pied-à-terre
and a boudoir
saturated with her pleroma.

we shared love and lust abundantly
but not the irrelevancy of names.

at dusk we smoked my last Gauloise.

‘il est temps que tu partie?’

‘will I see you again?’

‘bien sûr, cherie, je serais toujours là pour toi.’

dizzied by the audacity
of carefree love,
I skipped the tangle of Pimlico streets.

now I trudge the pavement maze
traipsing yellow clouds
of hazy memory,

and haunt the banks of the Regent’s Canal.

Resting in a hill station guest-house,
over the worst of dysentery.

The bazaar dealer's tab,
“Sir, good stuff... straight up...
San Francisco. Yellow Sunshine."
Is starting to hit and
I'm smoking a chillum of charas.

Through the fog of writhing smoke
and dancing rainbow mountain mists,
I watch a woman,
a Mahavidya - maybe
pad the jasmine track
to a distant wayside shrine.

Pennants and wind chimes
line the pathway.
Incense drapes the trees.

She sings a hymn;
echoing against granite crags
rebounding in the songs of birds
it entrances me even
as it mystifies me

‘her gods are not known to me,
all gods are unknown to me’

She made the journey yesterday,
shoeless,
and the day before.

I feel the pulse of
foot... foot... foot
bruising the grass.

And with each weighted step
the sighing of rooted blades
that would walk beside her
if they could.

I am rooted too.

Drab Monday morning - another next week.
My life? Smart metered by Bingo sponsored
daytime t.v. Chat shows. Dry toast. Black tea.
I need essentials – a trip to Aldi.
A tyre’s punctured – it’s a long wet trek
in sighing rain. I can go tomorrow.
There’s a tin of beans – they’re much better cold.

I am not alone, unloved, neglected,
women have loved me - but no one lately,
not since Aoife. I really blew it there.
I could have, should have, handled it better,
played hard to get. They say women like that,
but I was in love - assumed she loved me,
like a fool rushed in – I assumed wrongly.

I pink-ribboned her cards, her billets-doux.
slid them behind flea market curios
in my wall mounted trophy cabinet .
An obscure treasure. A secret love,
out of sight to curious eyes but mine.
Did she ever love me? Who is to say?
She was expert at ambiguity.

Watching ‘Jeremy Kyle’ (for schadenfreude)
my ennui was tranquillity compared.
A sudden eruption - kitchen bedlam.
The immoveable cabinet, constant,
symbolic perhaps of my devotion
slumped suicidally from its fixings -
two doors unhinged and three glass panes broken.

The fallen cupboard straddled a table
and fortuitously placed Chesterfield.
Porcelain tea pots, Moroccan tagines
(bought from a hawker in Albufeira)
smashed bottles, a vintage perculator
shards of glass, fragments of terracotta
carpeted the quarry tiled kitchen floor.

A paste jar – anchovy, and Knorr Stock Pot
spilled. Defacing a favourite snapshot -
Aoife at lunch, waving, blowing kisses.
I licked a soft cloth to stroke clean the smears
but erased her face, the eyes and the hair.
Aoife faded like a dissolving wraith -
two fingers left and enigmatic smile.

A jag of loneliness washed over me.
“... had an accident that was not your fault?”
from the t.v. brought tears of rage from me.
A cup of tea? Both mugs were smithereens.
My passport lay ‘Lea and Perrins’ dripped wet.
I cuffed off the sauce stain and headed South
by boat and train to buy a new tagine.

I am sitting on a Lisbon terrace,
eating fried anchovies, drinking douro .
Sea gulls swoop. Dancing jasmine scents the breeze.
A trio plays. A woman sings fado.
Her song bleeds duende. The hurt of love.
I don’t know the words but I know... I know.
They sing of my life. They sing of Aoife.

As winter yields
and April fades to May
the lengthening days
awaken cigarette haze
and Tullamore Dew
cloaked memories
of that summer we shared
on Árainn Mhór:

You lying in the sun
reading the thickest books we found
yellowing in a Dungloe shop window;
illustrated Life of Brian scripts,
The Last Temptation of Christ,
you liked them both –
and you, an atheist.

Naked splashing
in a spring-water rock pool
warmed in the sun
flushed by the tide.

As the Earth turned slowly
and seeming timeless
campfire evenings
stretched tilting –
tilting into darkness
I drank too much ‘Tullamore’
and you sipped rum.

You lying on talc-soft
passionate sand
beneath a parasol,
a wisp of gauze draped –
for decency’s sake –
casually across your thighs,
captivated me.

You laid aside
‘The Last Temptation’
as I walked toward you
and I swear to God,
that in your face
I saw the face of God.

And your welcoming smile
was His smile
and your wide-open arms
were His arms
and your acceptance of me
was His acceptance.

I hope I’m not disturbing you,
I had to speak to you again.

Straight from the ferry from Burtonport
I hired a bike and rode past Lough Shore
to the old lighthouse
where you spent long hours
painting your watercolours
and wanted to settle
but the cancer feasting on you
devoured you

I buried your ashes
in the amphora
you brought from Syria -
planted an asphodel
and inscribed a memorial
on a flat chalk stone,

“Here lies my brief miracle.”

Weathered by winters
the inscription is faded.

I sit drinking rum –
it tastes of your hugs
embraces my soul
you are near
you are
so very near.

I will go to the shore
to find another
white soft-stone marker,
and on it I’ll write,

“Tread gently... Saoirse dreams here.”