ARTS page online is going to run a poem selected from the Limerick City of Culture anthology of poetry, ‘Dream of a City’ (Astrolabe Press), on a regular basis.
The series opens with Limerick man Paul Sweeney’s work, from ‘With Usura, Etcetera Etcetera’. Sweeney is one of the founding pillars of CUISLE, Limerick’s annual international poetry festival. This poem belongs to the netherworld of an office that has closed after the day, all workers gone but one. Drained, there is that strange transition from 9-5 ordinary to a zone “of hemlock drink” and fugitive dream of escape from a place in life distinguished only by the smell of “broken open reams of paper”.
From ‘With Usura, Etcetera Etcetera’
Smelling broken open reams of paper/ Dust jackets lifted off the office machines,/ Night-scrubbed reflective surfaces/ Suggest the self-replenishing rooms of a fairy tale.
I think there is something in the office air/ Small, pollen-like, but with no after life,/ Life’s pumice-like.
The ventilator preens the air/ Of such infestation, but there is no perfect hermeneutic/ To delineate the human.
As I was contemplating the flickering concept/ Of fluorescent lighting, a dark moth settled in the corner/ By the water cooler and though the concept/ Flickered I could not notice it,/
Yet mind made for a half-blind metaphor/ With silence or with death, And smiled like a child proved right/ and then sent straight to bed.
I gutter down the corridor/ Among the eyes that cast out the line/ “Accept, Accept”, the eyes that only meet/ Among reflections thrown out into window-space,/ Like random bacteria trying/ To make it out of the numbers into the names.
The Granny Smith jingle/ Heard at breakfast lodges between your thoughts/ Like a piece of virtual apple skin,/ Until at noon you begin to hum the tune you hate/ And the word love adopts a poster’s random face.
On the walls prints of Rothko and Lichenstein/ Affect an impossible emptiness of information.
*
In the bathroom, the light bright and hard/ My close read skin is granulated like a pear,/ Fault lines erupt old arguments,/ Everything is intent upon its toll.
I clean the lenses of my glasses with toilet roll,/ Wash my hands, squint at the mirror to make sure/ Neither tie nor features have slipped further/ Out of place, mouth a curse for better or for worse,/ Finger a silent message onto the mirror/ To be detonated by a stranger’s breath…./“There is still time; make a run for it”.
If they were to make you of hemlock drink,/ It would be from such a bathroom sink/ Attended to by video links;/ You begin to feel yourself go numb/ As you lose dimensions one by one.
