Cricket

(for Margaret)

1. Rain dripping and one cricket singing.
On grey, the silhouettes of hills are dark.
The house on the rise is a fortress lit
among the self-seeding woods of oak.
In summer it seemed there was something afoot
when so many cricket-urgencies trilled out,
but autumn has hollowed things to the husk:
one phone that rings unanswered in the dusk.
I am amazed by this call
coming so clear from the all-
but-invisible fields although
the batteries of the year are running low.
Rain drips continuously down.
Will someone please answer that phone?

2.

Sometimes when I'm away from home
and call you and there's no answer,
I can feel the house's emptiness, picture
our fortress lit but deserted,
or think of a film in which a phone
is ringing above a body on the floor.
Here in the dusk I can still make out
the gap-toothed leaves of the oaks,
portents that signify - signify what?
What is it out there only a cricket
rubbing its wings together,
making a sound like a phone
that sings through the dripping of rain
from the oaks of the self-seeding wood.

News

Once more what's happening doesn't fit
into the cage we've made for it.
People are kissing in the winter street:
the most unlikely pairs have got together -
fair and well-built with short and stout,
the tall and dark with anoraks drab and wan.
It's like some lovely lively foreigners
who came to give a facelift to the town
are not taking up with the right sort!

Or like there's still a war somewhere
but it has finally moved away from here.
Citizens bustle past who slouched before.
What's coming over folk? Too many
previously dependable characters
are beginning to depart from the script.
As we're shunting grievances into place
on what is very much a siding,
news reaches us that life's a mainline train.

^

Biography

Ciaran O'Driscoll was born in Callan, Co. Kilkenny, and lives in Limerick, where he lectures in the School of Art and Design at the Limerick Institute of Technology. He has published four poetry collections, Gog and Magog from Salmon Publishing, Galway, 1987, and the following three from The Dedalus Press, Dublin: The Poet and His Shadow (1990), Listening to Different Drummers (1993), and The Old Women of Magione (1997), which is based on a year the poet spent in Italy. He has been represented in various anthologies, and has also published a longer poem, The Myth of the South, in an edition of 300 copies (Dedalus,1992), and various prose. He has given readings and lectures widely in Europe and North America, and selections of his work have been translated into French, German, Italian, Hungarian and Serbo-Croat. He has won a number of awards, including an Arts Council Bursary (1983), the James Joyce Literary Millenium Prize (1989) and, in January 2000, the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. Moving On, Still There: New and Selected Poems is due to be published by Dedalus in 2001.