Musee d'Orsay

(April 1998)

The Quai Voltaire could easily be
Bachelor's Walk for the breeze that chills,
the murky sky and the inexorable April rain,
the Pont Neuf straddling the Liffey's sludge
and pointing the way to a dismal Capel St.,
the Louvre a weather-washed Four Courts,
the Pont des Arts a fleshed out Halfpenny Bridge.

A counter-vision coruscates and swells,
transcending wetness, beyond drip and cling,
embracing summer colours, motions, light:
a line of trees and a red-tiled house,
white and azure skies, lavender skirts,
a lady with a straw boater and a parasol
beside a child drowning in meadow grass;
another lady with her sunblessed child
(with space for another, and another)
entering a poppy field in Argenteuil.

Undertow

Run the video of Dr No backwards
and Ursula Andress dissolves
through a hole in the glistening ocean.
Or picture Venus backtracking
on the ebb tide of a swelling backwash.

Though I was no sexy secret agent hero,
you left me shell-shocked,
dabbling my feet in the undertow,
still worshipping the ground
you nearly walked upon.

^

Biography

Michael Durack is a member of Killaloe Writers Group, and his poems have been published in a variety of magazines and journals, including InCognito, Riverine, Flaming Arrows, The Burning Bush and Poetry Ireland Review.