Two Poems
By Paul Perry.
Towing an Iceberg to Belfast
for Rita Duffy
On the tip of her tongue
She’s …
Don’t think of melting
Pools along the way
A river
Think swimmers
shipbuilding
On the long finger
She’s …
Don’t say it
Stop making sense
She’s …
Towing an iceberg to Belfast
By a horse and cart
In wheelbarrows
A berg
A mountain
A mountain of ice
Read:
All poetry is performance
All poetry is language
Not the iceberg
An iceberg
Blue and …
By dreams
with dreams
in dreams
Amen
She’s …
Towing an iceberg to Belfast
And gladly
To return
Return the scene of the crime
To its …
She’s …
On the back
Of an old morris minor
An exploded artefact of sorts
From the Falls
We’ll all be there
When she’s coming round the mountain
Coming round
The mountain of ice
The ice berg
We’ll all be there
And what of the ship
What ship
Ghost ship
Don’t say it’s name
Swallowed by a bottle
Why not
Why not
A blue bottle
Buzz
And floating the waves
With a message
For everyone
Arrival time
Forever and some
Museum of ice
Of found bodies
Returned to their resting place
Thirty years
agreed
Here she comes
Thank the …
With the arrival of the iceberg
It is agreed
All poems are to be decommissioned
At last
the city exhales
An icy breath
A River in the Irish Midlands
the stones shine like silver
and sink into your hands
slip into knots and become
the anchor of a longing
that will not break its bounds
where water is alive with voices
and sunlight wickers and shakes
the fronds and gold flowers
rain’s witness calls out a clue
to the secret of the river
and a girl’s drowned eyes
extinguished sometime blue
ripple and rise into the net
of an anyday Sunday memory
what they say is simple
no one fishes here anymore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Perry is the author of two critically acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently The Orchid Keeper (Dedalus Press, 2006). A new book The Last Falcon and Small Ordinance is due from the same press in 2009. Born in Dublin, he programmes the Aspects Literature Festival in Bangor, Co. Down and teaches for the MFA Programme in Creative Writing at Kingston University, London.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, November 24th, 2008.
