other words

Greg Delanty,
ireland

Greg Delanty was born in Cork in 1958. His collections are Cast in the Fire (Mountrath, The Dolmen Press, 1986);
Southward (Dublin, Dedalus, 1992); American Wake (1995); The Hellbox (Oxford, The Oxford University Press, 1998);
The Blind Stitch (Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2001); and The Ship of Birth (Carcanet Press, 2003). With Nuala Ní
Dhomhnaill, he edited Jumping Off Shadows, Selected Contemporary Irish Poetry. He lives in Vermont, USA.

------------------------The Blind Stitch

I can’t say why rightly, but suddenly it’s clear once more
--------what holds us together as we sit, recumbent in the old ease
of each other’s company, chewing the rag about friends,
--------a poem we loved and such-like. Your Portuguese skin,
set off by a turquoise dress, doesn’t hinder either.
--------But there’s something more than tan-deep between us.
I sew a button to a waiscoat you made me, ravelled years ago.
--------You hemmed it with the stitch you mend a frock with now.
Our hands, without thought for individual movement, sew in
--------and out, entering and leaving at one and the same time.
If truth be told, the thread had frayed between us, unnoticed,
--------except for the odd rip. But as we sew, love is
in the mending, and though nothing’s said, we feel it
--------in a lightness of mood, our ease, our blind stitch.

----------International Call

A hand holds a receiver out a top-storey window
in a darkening city. The phone is the black,
old heavy type. From outside
what can we make of such an event?
The hand, which seems to be a woman’s,
holds the phone away from her lover, refusing
to let him answer his high-powered business call.
More likely a mother has got one more
sky-high phone bill and in a tantrum warns
her phone-happy son she’ll toss the contraption.
A demented widow, having cracked the number
to the afterlife, holds the receiver out
for the ghost of her lately deceased husband.
He’s weary of heaven and wants to hear dusk birds,
particularly the excited choir of city starlings.
It’s always dusk now, but the receiver isn’t held out
to listen to the birds of the Earth from Heaven.
It’s the black ear and mouth in the hand of a woman
as she asks her emigrated sisters and brothers
in a distant country if they can hear the strafing,
and those muffled thuds, how the last thud
made nothing of the hospital where they were slapped
into life. The hand withdraws. The window bangs closed.
The city is shut out. Inside now, the replaced phone
represses a moan. Its ear to the cradle
listens for something approaching from far off.