An ice cube may appear mundane at first glance, but transport it to Bronze Age Crete and it comes alive with a whole new world of connotations: it transforms into a luxury, a logistical extravagance. Who gets to consume this rare commodity, what deals have they struck to acquire it and with whom, and what ends will they go to in order to retain it? Would I strike these same deals and go to those same ends? I love how a historical consideration of an object unearths new dimensions, textures and economies within it.
Objects carry these histories, but as we encounter and consume and make use of them in everyday life, these myriad significances collapse into a singular functional role. This mirrors our experience of words and language. Almost every word contains a legion of potential connotations and usages but of necessity we collapse these into something approaching a singular meaning when we speak in order to communicate. When we read on Twitter that a company has liquidated its assets, we understand this as information relating to finance and do not picture the assets literally melting into a puddle. Poems offer a space to coax meaning and significance from language, to extend them past the point of immediate, pragmatic collapse. I love poems which strike a balance between what sounds (relatively) inconspicuous to the ear but also where the deeper suggestions of the language are just beginning to break through to the surface.
Like objects, words have their own histories and I often lose hours going down the rabbit hole of etymological dictionaries. Recently, while attempting to write a poem about a windmill, I was fascinated to discovered that the m-l in mill is the same m-l in molar and the same m-l in maelstrom; all deriving from a root *mele meaning to crush or grind. For me, part of the joy of writing a poem is playing these fossilizations within the language off against the living, breathing connotations we create for the words as we go about living our lives.
I write poems because (like anyone else) I have strong feelings about the things I experience and witness, and (like anyone else) I have a strong desire to justify those feelings to myself. When I read poems it is because I want to feel something, some connection to another person, some sense that my own human experiences are out there in the world and some image of them will be mirrored back to me. When I write a poem, it is, at its heart, an attempt to make another person feel something. It has the kind of charged sensation of getting something off your chest; of telling something you hadn’t realised you were holding back; of saying the hard things like ‘I’m scared’ or ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I’m grateful’, which I suppose are all kinds of variations on the theme of ‘I’m here’. Or, even, something’s here.
*
Because light
is in the habit
of recurring,
and even suns
must be subject
to the elasticity
of their routines;
because photons
plot their lives
through regular
traceable arcs –
there’s a living
to be made
standing still,
hands in pockets,
making places dark.
Desperate to get south, I accept the king’s commission.
On the black-sailed ship, I stew in my cabin, nauseous,
and ignore the captain’s well-intentioned advice
to come up into the air and stare at the horizon.
Out of tact, that first night, I keep my eyes lowered
when his majesty raises his voice to cow his daughters.
The queen is icy. Her awful son makes an off-colour joke
and my scalp prickles as I sense him weigh my reaction.
In the morning, left to my own devices, I sit on the porch
and drink orange juice and sparkling water in the sun.
Ice is hauled down from the mountains in great dwindling blocks.
It hisses in my glass like a palace coup.
I understand now how, exactly, I’m a coward.
And how little it has taken to endear to me walls and ditches
and barriers of any kind, and of ever increasing convolution.
I understand now the king is an excuse. This was always inside me.
When money was scarce, travel slow and perilous, illiteracy widespread, and mail service highly uncertain and destinations only vaguely perceived, the departure to North America of a relative or neighbour represented as final a parting as a descent to the gravel.
K.A. Miller
It had all the mundanities
of truly significant events:
clearing the front room of dust,
a quick inventory of cups, saucers,
other quiet emblems of normality
pitching themselves suddenly forward
as from the background of a painting,
taking on a new, terrible solidness.
And then again, moments
when he felt something begin to swell
like the ripe side of a hill
he’d only just noticed was always there.
Invitations were clipped and embarrassed
and soon digressed to easier talk
of harvest, health or courtship.
One neighbour met him at the gate
as though to keep a ghost
from the threshold of a living home.
And they waked him –
with furniture pushed against the walls,
the room made strange with space;
with scraps of fond advice
pieced together in hushed tones;
with all the ache and memory muscle retains
of grief and grief’s recurring motions –
they waked a living man.
Because even though there is a difference
between being dead and leaving,
there is a likeness between dying
and being somewhere that isn’t here.
The fine coppered and copper-fastened bulk
measures up to all the advertisements.
Seven-hundred tons of burden, crouched in harbour,
ready for the great plié and open ocean.
Each inch of rigging accounted for, coiled
and stowed or already high above everything,
loosed and swinging between the masts,
through air and evaporated salt crystals.
A crowd of people huddle up into a stubby queue
exchange a particular kind of currency:
doctor aboard – always finds clear weather –
lucky – lit a candle – write letters – you’ll be fine –
Beyond the ship, rock pools shine under the sun,
a rich sardonyx burnished by sea water.
On the dock, they’ve unloaded the last of the cargo:
red and yellow pine timber from America and Quebec.
It couldn’t have been easy getting it to lie flat on paper.
That’s obvious from the asterisks.
Above the notes on the stave are some bizarre annotations:
Sobbing. Hand clapping. A kind of shake.
It’s impossible to guess how they might fit into the music.
I can’t read it well enough to get any real feel for the tune –
just enough to recognise the stranger movements.
There are parts where it breaks down to only two notes
going up and down and up from quaver to semiquaver.
A part in the middle accelerates to the point of nonsense
and I’m wondering as I look at it if this is just noise.
I’m almost certain it’s unsingable.
In small letters along the bottom someone has written
och, och, och in embarrassed cursive script.
A final note in Italian says how loud the piece should be.
This preposterous
bottom-up approach:
mixing fungus
into wet and powder;
with time and proofing
it eats itself large,
comes alive,
devours its sugars
and doubles in size,
must be knocked,
then stretched, folded,
made elastic and smoother
so hooks of gluten
may snag together
in the kneading,
net themselves
in anticipation
of high temperatures,
effervescence,
transfiguration.
When he looked at it he realised the fuse
box must have caught fire briefly because
the switches had all melted into thick
plastic blobs and there was an acidic
discolouration about the edges.
This meant no cooker, no kettle. The fridge
would have to be kept shut to keep the cold
in. The landlord was hard to get a hold
of – instead, he emptied cans of Pepsi
into the sink, carved them up carefully,
punctured neat holes in them with a corkscrew
and poured in a bright purple ethanol.
Denatured, undrinkable, it burned blue
and cooked beans and tea with a tang of metal.
what would you say
if it turned out
i was a giant
mechanical
spider who
didn’t really
like the things we
both said we liked
if on further
inspection you
were to discover
my insides were
chock-full of
counterfeit silk
and i hated
your friend lisa
what if my gums
concealed big steel
fangs needed to eat
that retracted
seamlessly
that envenomed
that were very
much part of me
i hope that you’d
take a step back
think rationally
try to see things
as seen from
my perspective
hung upside down
from the ceiling
my nana told me how my aunt
got allergies one year suddenly
from the christmas tree
how she took steroids for a week
to no avail in hopes of keeping
a real tree in her living room
she had to give up at 3am
on the 24th when it came down
to authenticity or breathing
she slipped out to the supermarket
open all night for christmas
and got a flat-packed tree instead
i can’t stop imagining her doing the swap
the silent undecorating
the indignant ornaments on the floor
temporarily
i can’t stop being impressed
by this colossal sleight of hand
the next morning my aunt asked her family
if they noticed anything different
and her husband panicked and said she looked nice
it was almost new year’s
when he took out the vacuum
and noticed there were no pine needles
while the bubble still glistens like a weekend away
and each year of the nineties sits on the calendar
in front of you like a fat promise
and both your parents are alive and around the corner
and in the papers and the magazines and on the weather
the threat of nuclear annihilation has subsided
to the point where you can start buying garden furniture
and speaking candidly to your doctor about sex
drive west to the fuchsia and the holiday homes
where on hot late nights you are implored
by friends and strangers alike to sing and sing and sing
because the icecaps are melting
and xtravision despite its robust complexion
will liquidate its stock and eventually cease trading
*
CONOR CLEARY is from Tralee, Co. Kerry and lives in Belfast. His work has appeared in The Tangerine, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly and Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2018 he was the winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award. His debut poetry pamphlet, priced out, was published by The Emma Press in 2019.