Stephen McInerney: Four Poems

Shadows and Reflections

Stirring on the couch this August afternoon,
a big log breaking open in the stove,
I wake to reflections in the cabinet’s glass,
of sloping roofs, a line of winter trees
stripped to the bone and shivering in the breeze,
one branch brushing lightly against the window.
I could, with a pane of frosted glass, transform
that gesture into art: the kind I’ve seen
in sunrooms when I’ve stepped in from the snow:
iced-windows like a Chinese folding screen
on which was spread, like ink, a delicate shadow.
Glancing from my book, I’d note the stages
of the branch’s perfect shadow on the glass,
the shadow’s perfect pattern on my pages,
an aching thing that yet could not be broken,
brushing against the window’s fragile ice
like one who’d brush the sleep from dreaming eyes
when I was young, until I’d reach for her
who now, from her long sleep, will not be woken.
I wake today, but long for another winter.

Stephen McInerney

At a Tangent to the World

We’d take our coffee under
fig trees or cypresses,
sheltering from the winter
back home, and find some peace
in the goats’ tocsin bells,
crumbling houses, doorways, paths
through green-and-orange hills,
mauve mountains further back;
each moment, each day that passed
was something that we’d lack
but always try to recover,
from then on, in one another.

I’d glance up from my book
in bed, and might recall
olives, bread, the look
of sunlight on a wall
in Yiayia’s whitewashed room;
you, your memory stirred
by the smell of lemons, loam,
or the sound of falling stones
dislodged by the herd,
would recall the rare peach tones
of the hotel in Kiato,
and wander to the window.

And linger there a while,
not knowing what to say,
unhurried, in profile,
on my final day,
as curtains like a mist
ghosting off the scree
opened an autumn vista:
stars above villages
all the way to the sea,
and orchards lit with oranges
in valleys below…
that must be filling now with snow.

Stephen McInerney

A Summer Night, Kiama

In the round night cicadas
match the pulsing of the stars
with their song. The priceless ceiling
of Sainte-Chapelle this evening
seems curiously small
with rare, intricate detail
as it settles its French dome
on my New South Wales home:
there is just enough blue
in that black to make it true.

From the evening’s warm cocoon
little bugs of the risen moon
like angels receive their wings
and flutter on a thousand things,
in the waters of the bird bath
at the end of the garden path,
making a fragile stained glass
from lemon tree and bottle brush,
which live in the cool reflection
with a life not quite their own.

Stephen McInerney

On First Reading Motion’s Larkin

Taking Larkin’s own advice
about starting biographies a little way in,
so as to avoid the analysis
of a boring childhood, I begin
Motion’s biography of Larkin
at chapter five, page thirty-seven.

Oxford. Yet as Larkin said,
it’s not the Oxford of Charles Ryder
devouring the Marchmains’ plovers’ eggs,
or Sebastian with his teddy bear.
That Oxford seems as far away
as childhood does from me today.
I sit remembering it for ages,
for about as long as it would have taken
to read the first three-dozen pages,
which might have been all there was of Larkin.
If there weren’t so many pages in it,
death could come at any minute.

Stephen McInerney