___________________________________________________________________________
CAUGHT IN THE NET 122 - POETRY BY
DONAL MAHONEY
Series Editor - Jim Bennett for The Poetry Kit -
www.poetrykit.org
___________________________________________________________________________
You can join the CITN mailing list at
-
http://www.poetrykit.org/pkl/index.htm
and following the links for Caught in the Net.
Submissions for this series of Featured poets is open, please
see instruction in afterword at the foot of this mail.
_________________________________________________________________
.
As usual, they're lost
inside old overcoats,
their collars up,
their scarves too long,
their yarmulkes,
as always,
in diffidence
askew.
from; Crackling Again by Donal Mahoney |
________________________________________________________________
CONTENTS
1 - BIOGRAPHY
2 – POETRY
Coma
Memories
Woman in the Day Room Crying
The Widow Murphy Sets Her Cap
Apple Fritter and a Single Rose
In Break Formation
An Irish Christening
Bag Lady
Lifts Her Like A Chalice
That Greyhound Station
The Man Who Lives in the Gym
Brisk Man from Jaipur
Crackling Again
Those Poems, That Fire
|
3 - AFTERWORD
___________________________________________________________________________
1 – BIOGRAPHY: Donal Mahoney
Donal Mahoney was born to Irish immigrant parents in Chicago, Illinois. He used
a couple of degrees in English to earn a living as an editor of magazines and
books and as a fundraiser for a charity. Words and people are the two things in
life that he’s been most interested in. He is the father of five children, four
normal and the other a Rhodes Scholar. He had 100 poems or so published in print
journals in the late ‘60s and early‘70s and then quit writing for 35 years to
earn a living. He resumed writing in 2008 at his wife’s behest, after retirement
and after she bought him a computer as a birthday gift. She also showed him
where in the basement cardboard boxes of drafts of his old poems had sat
undisturbed for decades. Some of the poems in this group are based on personal
experience but others are fabrications arrived at without the benefit of drink,
something the author hasn't tasted since the Sixties. In some ways that's good
but at times it's a crying shame.
______________________________________________________________
2 - POETRY
Coma
Sleet on the turnpike
in the middle of the night
but I keep driving,
both hands on the wheel,
nowhere to pull off,
and a yellow bus
comes over the line
and kisses my truck.
That's all I remember.
Now I'm in bed,
wired to things,
unable to move,
listening to a doctor
telling my wife,
"It's been two weeks,
no improvement."
He asks her nicely
if we should let him go,
the dimwit bastard.
If I could, I'd scream
but I can't even
wiggle my toes.
Memories
If one could store them
in the attic without stir
and turn to other things,
to picking fruit, perhaps,
or seeding it, one could afford
the dalliance of an hour
for one would have the years
one knows will not be those
whose paralytic youth has just begun,
the years whose summer plea
for laughter and for kiss
somersault the hair
and scimitar the smile: the years
the sun, the moon, the stars
can never order stop.
Woman in the Day Room Crying
Lightning bolts in childhood
can scar the soul forever.
They're a satanic baptism
when the minister's your father,
mother, brother, sister,
anyone taller, screaming,
shooting flames from the sky
all day, all night.
The years go by
but the scars remain.
The pale moonlight of age
makes them easier to see
and scratch until they burst
and bleed again,
another reason I wake up
at night screaming.
When the daylight comes,
I talk about the scars
when no one is around
to say shut up!
I draw the details in a mural
on the walls and ceilings so
everyone can see the storms
that never left a rainbow.
The Widow Murphy Sets Her Cap
Mrs. Ryan keeps her cat inside at night
but lets it out at dawn to go anywhere it likes
while she's at work. Every day the cat
crosses the road to call on the Widow Murphy.
Mrs. Ryan doesn't know her cat calls on Mrs. Murphy
but she has told the widow twice her cat is on a diet:
a little kibble in the morning and a little water at night.
Nothing else. When the cat arrives at Mrs. Murphy's,
the widow lets him in and gives him warm milk
and a dollop of salmon on a porcelain saucer.
Afterward the cat takes a long nap on a Persian rug till
the widow lets him out in the afternoon
to cross the road and wait for Mrs. Ryan
to pull her Lincoln into the driveway.
Mrs. Ryan's husband, Paddy, now retired,
has never called on the Widow Murphy.
He doesn't know the widow's waiting.
Paddy likes his tea strong, his wife once said.
Apple Fritter and a Single Rose
After 30 years together,
Carol tells me late one evening
in the manner of a quiet wife
that I have yet to write a poem
about her, something she
will never understand in light
of all those other poems
she says I wrote
about those other women
before she drove North.
And so I tell her once again
I wrote those other poems
about no women I ever knew
the way I now know her
even if I saw them once or twice
for dinner, maybe,
and a little vodka
over lime and ice.
Near midnight, though,
she says again
in the manner of a quiet wife
it's been thirty years
and still no poem.
When morning comes
I motor off to town to buy
a paper and a poem
for Carol
but find instead
undulating in a big glass case
an apple fritter,
tanned and glistening,
lying there just waiting.
So I buy the lovely fritter
and a single long-stem rose
orphaned near the register,
roaring red, and still
at full attention.
I bring them home but find
Carol still asleep
and so I put the fritter
on the breadboard
and the rose right next to it,
at the proper angle.
When she wakes I hope
the fritter and the rose
will buy me time until
somewhere in the attic
of my mind I find
a poem that says
more about us than
this apple fritter,
tanned and glistening,
lying there just waiting,
and a single long-stem rose,
roaring red, and still
at full attention.
In Break Formation
The indications used to come
like movie fighter planes in break
formation, one by one, the perfect
plummet, down and out. This time they’re
slower. But after supper, when I hear her
in the kitchen hum again, hum higher,
higher, till my ears are numb,
I remember how it was
the last time: how she hummed
to Aramaic peaks, flung
supper plates across the kitchen
till I brought her by the shoulders
humming to the chair.
I remember how the final days
her eyelids, operating on their own,
rose and fell, how she strolled
among the children, winding tractors,
hugging dolls, how finally
I phoned and had them come again,
how I walked behind them
as they took her by the shoulders,
house dress in the breeze, slowly
down the walk and to the curbing,
how I watched them bend her
in the back seat of the squad again,
how I watched them pull away
and heard again the parliament
of neighbors talking.
An Irish Christening
Thomas said
you can’t go home again
but I did for my sister
and the christening of her first.
Everyone, on folding chairs, against
the whitewashed basement walls, was there
for ham and beef and beer, the better
bourbons, music, argument and talk.
Maura came; she hadn’t married.
Paddy, fist around a beer, declared
I owed my family the sight
of me more often.
Hannah, thickset now,
gray and apronless,
rose beside the furnace,
wolverined me to the coal bin door
and asked me in the face,
with sibilance and spittle,
who or what it was
that kept me anywhere,
everywhere, but there.
Bag Lady
Chicago’s North Side
This senior citizen
whose face is Rushmore still
squats with pigeons on the steps
of the Rogers Park Masonic Temple.
She wears a shawl this snowy day
and is beneath the visor of a hunting cap
a woman who has paused along the way.
Her shopping bags, stuffed, frayed,
and each square feature of her face confess
she speaks at best a little English.
Rested, she will rise,
a penguin on a floe,
and navigate her day.
Lifts Her Like A Chalice
The weekday Mass at 6 a.m.
brings the old folks out
from bungalows
around the church.
They move like caterpillars
down sidewalks,
some with canes,
some on walkers.
Father Doyle says the Mass
and then goes back to the rectory
to care for his mother
who cannot move or speak
because of a stroke.
And every Sunday at noon
when the church is full,
Father Doyle, in full vestments,
wheels his mother
in a lump
down the middle aisle
and lifts her like a chalice
and places her in the front pew
before he ascends to the altar.
Sometimes at night,
when his mother's asleep,
Father Doyle comes back to the Church
and rehearses in the dark
three hymns she long ago
asked him to sing at her funeral.
He practices the hymns
because the doctor said
she could go at any time.
When that time comes,
he doesn't want to miss a note.
The last thing she ever said was
"Son, I'll be listening."
That Greyhound Station
This woman
I am interviewing,
one of her front teeth
crosses over the other
and sticks out like a leg
crossed over the other.
Otherwise I would hire her;
I am certain of that.
But she reminds me too much
of that Greyhound station
at three in the morning.
There, alone on a bench,
across from me still,
her little dress up,
skulls of bare knees,
hillbilly child waiting.
The Man Who Lives in the Gym
St. Procopius College
Lisle, Illinois
after World War II
The man who lives in the gym
sleeps in a nook up the stairs
to the rear. Since Poland
he's slept there, his tools
bright in a box locked
under his bed. At noon bells
call him down to the stones
that weave under oaks
to the abbey where he
at long table takes
meals with the others
the monks have let in
for a week, or a month,
or a year or forever,
whatever the need.
The others all know
that in Poland his wife
had been skewered,
his children partitioned,
that he had escaped
in a freight car of hams.
So when Brother brings in,
on a gun metal tray,
orange sherbet for all
in little green dishes,
they blink at his smile,
they join in his laughter.
Brisk Man from Jaipur
Two men tall,
one from here
and one from there,
in raincoats
at a bus stop,
pace and stare.
One of them
is soaked in tea,
brisk man from Jaipur
who semaphores
an anthracitic glare.
To barter for a smile
an alien’s obeisance
he, no fawn,
refuses.
The other man,
white cane and dog,
doesn’t seem to care.
Crackling Again
This brilliant winter morning finds
waves of snow on every lawn
and red graffiti dripping
from the walls
of Temple Mizpah
once again
as down the street
stroll ancient men
who every morning
shuffle here for prayer.
As usual, they're lost
inside old overcoats,
their collars up,
their scarves too long,
their yarmulkes,
as always,
in diffidence
askew.
This morning, though,
they don't go in.
They shuffle near the curb
like quail.
They can't believe
the goose-step scrawl
on every wall.
They know their world's
awry again, an encore
of the chaos left behind
when they were young.
The good thing is,
Chicago's better now
than was Berlin back then
even though the temple walls
make clear this morning that
someone's struck another match
and the ovens of Auschwitz
are crackling again.
Those Poems, That Fire
I stood in the alley, still
in pajamas, somebody’s shoes,
another man’s coat, my eyes
on the bronc of the hoses.
Squawed in the blankets of neighbors,
my wife and three children sipped
chocolate, stood orange and still.
Of the hundred or more I had stored
in a drawer, I could remember,
comma for comma, no more than four,
none of them final,
all of them fetal.
______________________________________________
3 - Afterword
Email Poetry Kit -
info@poetrykit.org - if you would like
to tell us what you think.
We are looking for other poets to feature in
this series, and are open to submissions. Please send one poem and a short
bio to - info@poetrykit.org
Thank you for taking the time to read Caught in the Net. Our other magazine s
are Transparent Words ands Poetry Kit Magazine, which are webzines on the Poetry Kit site and this can be found at -
http://www.poetrykit.org/