Karl O’Hanlon
Milestones
She and I were born today exactly one year apart;
This fact contained for me some vague and seedy hope
Of the kind held by delvers in horoscopes:
“Elopement likely late July as Jupiter enters your chart.”
The green-eyed girl who shadows me keeps certain pace behind
By one clear year, that all my birthday candles gutter
In her Dublin-distant breath, the mutter
Of old wishes wasted on one so disinclined.
Belfast in its mad month wears odd clothes:
The bus to town sights the golden ridge of Napoleon’s Nose,
The gorse-bright hills holding the city in the lee of its past.
And what is summered into being remains unknown to Belfast;
Collie-faced women trot along hauling groceries,
A jaunty old lad tilts at a rookery of Goths;
I thread through sunlit shoppers caught in the sorceries
Of shop windows, towards yeasty, unlit streets: an invert moth.
I stop at St. Mary’s but don’t go in, the mass is on:
Instead I loiter in the porch’s sun-split marblestone
And read the names of dead priests etched into the wall.
The earnest, the wicked, the sad or unimaginative: all
These intricate lives untold in birth and death dates.
And her with the mobile bottom-lip, the swept
Dun hair long twenty-four Julys: where, when time ablates
Such atlantic beauty to dust and memories some old men have kept,
Shall her name be written?
But she is young, and wears rosettes of youth
As if to say that joy is here, is here and better than truth.
I half-believe her: but I have watched the watery dawn dismay
The curtain edge, and seen the charmless sleep of weekday houses.
Between eternity’s loving jaws we force our carousels.
I count my twenty five years, their only disgrace
My stern design to put-off putting my heart in the right place.
No more thoughts now of her who confuses love with pity
I leave the church with firm intention; the pigeon-pensioned city
Darkens as I cast her out from places she has smitten.
After all, what is a milestone but the sober point when
You must say, ‘Look, the night’s come in,’ and turning, head back again.
Greenwood Glen, 20th of August, 2010.