Ailbhe Darcy Surreal-Absurd Sampler
If there are surrealist elements in my poems, they are – like everything else in my poems – simply stolen from other poets. When I try to think back through the poetry that has been important to me, my mind is a muddle of dream-like scenes that feel as real and important to me as any other memories. Night-gardens erupt across the kitchen window; my body, where you touch it, blossoms tiny white flowers, a purple bruise at the centre of each one. The flare of a red dress at a French lesson. A white spider holds up a white moth, engagingly. The sun speaks. A woman opens her front door to Jesus Christ and ushers him inside. To write poetry at all might be to see what in the world is beautiful because it is absurd. -Ailbhe Darcy
from Telephone
What’s given by the blast
is deep rain, an orgy of worms. Trees
shake their manes, each branch a business
of sexy division. Each bud has a drop for aureole
I want you to touch. Spring, and all
that.
We must have kissed a hundred times
in rain like this: I fell flat on my back
in a field; we waltzed about the fountain in that
Barcelona square, fought like
cats and dogs, and made up; or when I
dropped the bottle we were keeping
and it crashed a gloria of crimson rivulets.
You took me home, all the same.
All the same,
the blasting veteran on our bus home
wields his unbusy stump.
It never buds purple moles,
explodes wild carrot. It stays the same.
That’s why in your arms I sing
the man with a data drive embedded
where his finger was,
a virtual place
where anyone can wield six
lobster claws,
Max the robot cat, the device
you hold aloft when you don’t know
what’s playing
on the jukebox, even
our ultimate uploading to the internet;
and the world-altering pill
I take so that we make nothing
with our love,
all these years,
only my crazy new hairdo,
wet and wild against a field of white pillow,
and the maddening blip of your phone,
a little machine
demanding to be plugged in again.
Dark Looker
They rented the house by the quag for a fall.
He was writing a history of landfill;
she incubating, cooking kickshaw, the pair
of them chain-shot on the porch.
Locals warned them to beware the dark looker,
and science, he answered, is the view from nowhere.
She said nothing at that, only scored tight
little crescents in the skin of her grapefruit,
which oozed and was pellucid. Her far bits
grew horny, her top end bees-wisped.
*
Her feet have become claws completely
when she wakes birdalone one night: Tuesday,
though she’s long lost track.
His hairless
head protrudes from the duvet, leathery
as her soles or an alligator pear.
She does it –
(fuckit)
splits it wide open with a spoon –
and slips in down the looming hole
with a flutter –
to huddle mobled, runcibled there –
holy moiled, reduced to a head, roomed
of one’s own –
and expands no further.
Honk for Peace
Balloon animals everywhere at the La Porte County Fair that one Sunday.
A balloon monkey halfway up a balloon tree,
balloon Dalmatian pelicans, a balloon dragonfly with dogged felt tip marker eyes.
Me snarfing elephant ears nasty with sugar, you steak tips as usual,
our son petitioning for a balloon spider. What he got (and he’ll take
what he gets) was a balloon squid, pulled it along behind him like a pet.
It balloon shivered. We saw The Strangest Thing. Balloon dogs
turned balloon tricks. Driving home we drove past protestors.
You wouldn’t honk the horn, still insisting,
“Shouldn’t we present a strong response to chemical weapons?”
down through all the years, as if I hadn’t won the argument circa 2006.
I’ll think too late, triumphant: But America can’t afford
a response! (We don’t pay our soldiers.) Then, undoing it:
but of course we wouldn’t want to wake the boy, honking like loons.
The boy: sticky with lemon shake-up in the back seat, worn out
petting all those ponies. The balloons: cleaving the air in their free
flight, feeling its resistance.
The mornings you turn into a grub
it begins with the heart.
You lie listening to the thunder
of bin men hoisting garbage larvae
from outside every house. Your housemate
showers, bangs things, jangles keys, moves away at a trot.
You feel your blood thickening; slurring. You think of Henry Sugar,
able to self-diagnose. You warn the ceiling,
"I think I'm having a heart attack." Your chest seems to swell
or contract. You wonder if you have woken as a fat, middle-aged man,
instead of beside one.
You feel all sclerotic. No, you feel soft.
You feel like a scrambled egg omelette,
having once read the recipe in a Sunday supplement :
Edward de Bono's Jolly Good Eggs.
"Most omelette fillings," wrote Ed,
"are boring and detract from the eggs."
For this recipe you make the omelette as usual,
but before you fold it in two,
you fill up its belly with scrambled eggs.
The result is an omelette with an omelette taste
but a soft and runny interior. The taste
is pure egg all the way through. You are pure egg,
all the way through,
the mornings you turn into a grub.
Umbrella
Look at this couple scooting round the grass;
you can see that he’s spoken the rain
so they can hold the umbrella together.
It’s not an umbrella, it’s a silken manifestation
of something they’ve talked over and over.
So they parade it before guided tours,
the man with two croissants, the official lovers.
In their slipstream sunshine floats across
blind brick faces, puddles where I stop to cross
the road. It’s a creature they’re minding, a parallel
universe.
Later they’ll shelve its sinuous objections
and carry the umbrella upstairs to its aquarium.
Kiss it, wish it goodnight, godspeed, slán abhaile.
I love how it moves, so queerly eely through
that briny otherworld in which we can only splash.
Ailbhe Darcy is the author of Imaginary Menagerie (Bloodaxe, 2011) and, with S.J. Fowler, Subcritical Tests (Gorse, 2017.) Insistence (Bloodaxe, 2018) won Wales Book of the Year and the Pigott Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her work has been collected in various anthologies, including Staying Human: New Poems for Staying Alive; The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry; Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century. In 2020, she presented Alphabet on BBC Radio 4, a programme about Inger Christensen's extraordinary poem alfabet and its resonance in the age of climate change, produced by Megan Jones, and she is co-editor of A History of Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge, 2021.) She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff University. The university is deducting 50 per cent of her salary for participating in the UCU marking and assessment boycott.
