Conversations in the Dark at the Winter Solstice

T.S. Kerrigan

Copyright © 2005 by T.S. Kerrigan


Published by The New Formalist Press


XHTML & CSS design by Leo Yankevich

Aubade

With both their spouses still asleep indoors,
They leisurely retrace their steps last night
Beneath conspiring oaks and sycamores,
Like kids, their arms entwined in early light.
Where daffodils emerge beneath the green
Of oaks they find their special bench, grown shy
Before this changing early morning scene
Who seemed so bold beneath a darker sky.
Intrusive dawn reminds them of their lives.
Unconsciously, their hands unclasp, they chart
The precious time they’ve wasted, what survives,
And all their years together, years apart,
Then walk on back, recalling vanished things,
The heedless squandering of all those springs.

Elegy for an Actress

I always thought we’d meet again some day,
With you in pink or purple crepe de chine.
We’d have a glass or two of Chardonnay
And chat about the local drama scene.
Instead, I sit inside a dive alone
Off Fuller Street and nurse a Black and White,
A place with just a single telephone,
But then I won’t be calling you tonight.
For you there’s no Millennium, no chance
To rectify your failings down the years,
Not even one more, free for all, romance
No falling out, no last display of tears.
Upstaged by Death, you’ve left the masquerade,
Who lent a breadth to every part you played.

Hollywood, 1999

Roué

He sorts the things the years have left behind,
The locks of black, brunette, and yellow hair,
The silken articles of underwear
(Though none could sway his uncommited mind),
The cards from this or that exotic coast
From wealthy women entertained with flair,
Who breathlessly recall his savoir-faire,
All left unanswered by their former host.
Tonight he smells the scent of her perfume
Who lingered but a night within this room,
And all his handkerchiefs and pillow slips
Suggest to him that single pair of lips.
Can these few insubstantial souvenirs
Efface the heady triumphs of the years?

Elizabeth Thompson’s Seventy-Fifth Birthday

Tonight you speak the Christian names of men,
Your father, brothers, lovers, husbands, son,
You’ve known in more than three score years and ten.
As guests arrive, such talking’s quickly done,
You think about those figures just the same,
While wondering where to put those aging hands.
Now blow away each waxy candle flame.
As both your grownup daughters give commands,
The birthday gifts appear, are opened, put away.
The children, bored now, scuffle on the floor.
Pale matriarch, emaciated, grey,
recite those Christian names for us once more,
Your father, brothers, lovers, husbands, son.
To think you’ve lived to bury every one!

Happily Ever After

The old inconsequence of age: denied
My proper place and voice these latter days.
Who once received the unremitting praise
Of greater men, by lesser men deprived.
My fortune nearly gone, but not my pride.
I thought my deeds, performed in darker days,
Would, like a candle, keep my fame ablaze.
I might have known how men forget, deride.
Some cunning politicians now contend
I plundered Heaven, brought the wrath of God,
And some deny there ever was a stalk.
My pockets bare, without a bean to spend,
I drag another cow to fairs. How odd
To be so poor, so full of rambling talk.

Some still admire my lengths of golden hair
(Those ramparts he ascended on his quest),
And both my teenage daughters, passing fair,
Believe their mother’s calm and self-possessed.
But those who know me well have heard me voice
My sorrow over what my life is now,
A life so marred by one disastrous choice
That time can never soothe my knitted brow.
My false seducer slips away each year,
Philandering, they say, a crude Don Juan.
I never know what day he’ll reappear,
And, frankly, I’m most happy when he’s gone.
But, when I sleep, I wait in silent dread
I’ll feel his brutish tug upon my head.

Ancestors

Those old dissemblers reappear at dawn,
When morning breaks in planes of silver grey,
Converging on a patch of shadowed lawn,
To wake who might have slept quite late that day.
Their raison d’etre’s hard to understand.
They’re far too shy to meet us face to face,
(Or else they’d surely scold and reprimand).
They never think to haunt some other place.
At night they always stalk the rooms upstairs,
Annoy the neighbors’ howling dogs, who hear
Them groan with strange malades imaginaires.
They’ve threatened to come back again next year,
Those shy voyeurs, those intermeddling bores,
This time with swooning girls in pinafores.

As She Passed

She was passing my chair
To arrange a few mums
In a porcelain vase

For a moment or two,
When her fingertips strayed
On my shoulders and neck.

Though our eyes never met,
I looked up from my book
With a shudder inside.

When she’d finished the mums,
She was off to the town
In a train of cologne.

But that whole afternoon,
With the book put aside,
I relived each caress,

Those digressions of love
She’d forgotten about
In the moment she passed.

Lilith

Her eyes, so lovely then,
Could cast a winding skein
To trap unwary men.

Abstracted by those eyes,
I lingered night and day,
Believing all her lies.

And when, in her ennui,
She let me slip away,
I still was never free.

Obsessed with her each fall
When summer’s leaves began
Their dark recessional,

I called her name alone,
In throes of restless sleep,
A hunger in the bone.

No matter where I stray
Beyond her dark frontier,
I never find my way.

The Old Blatherskites Have their Say,
Bewailing the Current Generation

Jem
Look at those boyos, the swaggering fools,
Lurching through life with their drugs and their drink,
Getting expelled from the National Schools.
Blaring their rock music, how do they think?
Why would their bed mates ever suppose
Their gaudy tattoos and pierced ears and nose
Seem to the rest of us chic, debonaire?
Why do they look like they’re not really there?

Dosser
What will they do—become 9 to 5 boys
By snapping their fingers, like that, the fools?
The future’s no place for excuses and ploys,
Larking through life with your own set of rules.
They’ll never see crooked places made straight,
Or play at musical chairs with the great.
They’ll all learn in time they haven’t a prayer.
What are they laughing about over there?

Jem
Their nubile companions grown taciturn, grim,
How could these girls be appealing as wives,
These kittens they lent to friends on a whim?
How could their kind lead conventional lives?

Dosser
Imagine them parents, planned or unplanned,
Getting along with no money on hand,
Bathing the kiddies and combing their hair.
Why do they act like they don’t really care?

Jem
Or are we just envious, priest-ridden men,
Browbeat and bullied in chapel at ten,

Dosser
Rushed into marriage pre-penetration,
Purity mattering more than sensation.

Jem
Often pretentious,

Dosser
Seldom sincere.

Jem and Dosser
Why do we look like we’re not really here?

Nocturne

The shadowed moon invests the shore,
woman of roses, long black hair.
I knock three times outside your door.

I come to take your sailor’s place,
who winds have taken out to sea.
You drown me in a surf of lace.

Don’t send me off at morning tide,
when lights are dim along the coast,
but lie, like Eve, at Adam’s side.

Then let the cycling sky unwind,
embracing us in early light,
as though we two were all mankind.

I’ll stay until the night is done,
woman of roses, long black hair,
to find your mouth in moon, in sun.

Conversations in the Dark at Winter Solstice

Your father rings you up at four,
Complains your mother’s disappeared.
"She’s never run away before."

These calls of his are nothing new.
You answer, only half-awake,
"She died in early ‘92."

You sense his utter disbelief
Across the miles of trembling wires,
And then, in increments, his grief,

Until a voice detached and dry
You don’t recall you’ve heard before
Is muttering a faint goodbye.

You tell yourself beware
What night engenders there.

At five you hear your daughter’s cry
Downstairs, awaking scared, she’s dreamt
Her body hurtles down the sky,

A sky that’s so devoid of light,
It preys upon the human mind,
Dispels all sleep this winter night.

You hold her gently, first of all,
As though those clumsy hands of yours
Had power to break that silent fall,

Then whisper, “sleep,” aware
What night engenders there.

The Berkeley Hills

Though scattered through a hundred towns,
Their college days long past them now,
I still can feel their presence here,
The girls we coaxed on autumn nights
Among these lonely, windswept hills.
Relentless winter sweeps away
The signatures our bodies etched
On wooded slopes and meadow grass,
The pathways where no trace remains
Of transient markings passion left.
When fall transforms these glades and woods,
What memories remain for them?
The images of fumbling boys
Who drew them down in darkness once
Among these lonely, windswept hills?

Recessional

We find our lives in retrograde,
Our powers failing day by day,
Who longed to see a world remade,

Who faced the future unafraid,
Denied the symbols of decay.
We find our lives in retrograde.

The ones we trusted most betrayed
Us, brought us all within their sway,
Who longed to see a world remade.

We sensed too late the role they played,
The things they knew and didn’t say,
We find our lives in retrograde.

As time disbands the plans we’ve laid
And casts our dreams in disarray,
Who longed to see a world remade,

We’re left without a map to aid
Our steps along this darker way.
We find our lives in retrograde
Who longed to see a world remade.

September 11, 2001

Coole Park Revisited

I

“So many lovely things are gone,”
You said, those brooding latter days.
At Coole a Georgian manor house
Played host to genius down the years,
A country’s poets, playwrights, wits,
But blackguard time would pull it down.
Just up the road the Martyn heirs
Contrived to lose Tyllira House.
And none ascend your winding stair
At Ballylee but tourists now.

II

Returning to these Seven Woods,
I leave the world of men awhile,
I go to find those swans again
That wheel and dive across the lake,
Near kin of those you ventured once
Were emblems of the human soul.
What’s lost, preserved in years to come
No man can ever prophecy.
Will sylphlike swans be gliding here
When all is silence, man extinct?

Summer Snow

The winters at my uncle’s lodge
Are faded childhood memories,
Except that vivid face of hers
I saw just once when I was eight.
Returning from the slopes one day,
I shivered by a blazing fire.
Two girls I’d never seen approached.
“Been sledding through the snow?” one asked,
A stunning girl of twelve or so
With long black hair and deep blue eyes.
“I bet you’re freezing cold,” she purred.
I lied, a quaver in my voice.
“You haven’t found the summer snow beyond
The ridge?” she asked. “There’s drifts and drifts.
It’s warm and cozy there. You just lie down
And let it cover you; it's dreamy stuff.”
Her silent friend exchanged a look with her.
“I guess we have to go,” she said. “Goodbye,
But don’t forget those drifts of summer snow.
Perhaps we’ll see you there next time.”
A blaze destroyed my uncle’s lodge
Next autumn, when it didn’t rain.
Although we didn’t know it then,
We’d spent our final winter there.
What slopes I see these days appear
In dreams of summits far away.
I pull my sled across that ridge,
Still seeking drifts of summer snow.

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