Peter O’ Neill was born in Cork in 1967. He spent the majority of the nineties living and working in France, only returning to live in Dublin where he has been living ever since. He started writing in the mid eighties and his debut collection ‘Antiope’ was published in February by Stonesthrow Press, and to critical acclaim. “Certainly a voice to be reckoned with.” Wrote Dr. Brigitte Le Juez (DCU). He has had poems published by The Galway Review, A New Ulster, Abridged and The Scum Gentry (IRL), Danse Macabre, The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology and Poetic Diversity (USA), The Tenement Block Review and Angle (UK) .
Dublin Gothic
I
If I read another poem going diddle de aye
Dee Doo, with that same insane cadence and rhythm
As that blasted music funnelling out of the
Innumerable Blarney Stones
With its ‘Oh, so happy I’m Irish’ manure
I swear, I’ll fuck the bloody book over the
Garden wall. That’s not ‘Irish’, that’s Shite!
Irish! “What’s Irish?” so, I hear you say.
A pint of black stout, 95% dark ,
(As dark as your soul) with just a light
Creamy head of hope, a mere five percent!
With that object then in front of you,
There in some darkened snug, perhaps Martin
Hayes playing in the distance… Yes, rather dissonance.
II
The truth is I don’t know what Irish means.
But, when I do hear that word I think of a house,
Which doesn’t exist, on Tritonville Road
In Sandymount. Am I walking into eternity
Along Sandymount Strand? Just down from
The old ‘Oscar’ cinema, across the road –
Which also doesn’t exist! There in that old
Victorian House with the great bays flooding
The rooms with a singular light filtering in
Through the Ivy trees in the front garden.
There it was always Christmas with the
Scarlet sash of the great front door, on either
Side of which rested the Ionian columns:
There, English, Roman and Greek all leading to Irish!
III
But it was what went on inside that really struck me.
My grandfather threatening to throw my father’s copy
Of Ulysses out the window, that strikes me as being
Very Irish. How many more that are like he was, still?
My grandfather, the great patriot who was jailed by
The British for his part in the war of independence.
There is your locus to it now, the old sepia stained
Framed image of him posing calmly in his Free
State uniform with your grandmother by his side,
After he was released from Wormwood Scrubs-
Thanks to the change in public opinion.
He was now a hero, his sword hung laconically.
They stood together like that, he and her,
Side by side, for a full life time; is that being Irish?
IV
There is a night I will always remember,
Sleeping there as a child and awaking
From nightmare; the copse hall of shadows
Trembling their knotted limbs, a Buchenwald
Vegetation. Then, by the window lunar upon
The third floor, three ages of women meet,
With you there as on Macbeth’s heath;
Though this encounter more chillingly
Scandinavian. The Pigeon House view
Nowhere to be seen in sight, which many
Many years later you would connect to
The tune If I should fall from Grace with God.
Standing there ready to emigrate,
Contemplating, the open horizon.
| _________________ |
Minos’ Tail
One tree is all trees,
they all being universally one and the same.
That is, according to the great categorisation of Aristotle.
And so the sub-divisions began, starting with the two
umbrella groups deciduous and coniferous.
Laurel, oak and lemon being reserved for poets and kings,
while spruce, fir and monkey puzzle being set aside
for Joe Bloggs.
These trees, however, are from Ephesus.
There are no other saplings like they.
For when they tremble
before the great Heraclitean backdrop
they call the sky,
the light thunders…
and we,
yes ‘we’
remain very afraid,
not knowing why.
Adam and Eve , after Lukas Cranach the Elder, 1528
For Pauline O’ Hare
Separated, and on two wooden panels,
He on the left , head scratching,
The original Homer Simpson sans culotte.
She on the right hand assertive,
and already pissed with him.
“Here, yea’ dumb fuck!”
She seems to be saying,
offering the Pink Lady to him.
The serpent, all this time… inconsequential.
Beethoven
For Christian Thielemann
Such phantasmagoria, this architecture
Aural, composed on mere air…
A metropolis, borne over on a forest of strings,
And woodwind, transporting the spirits –its freight-
Through a sublime, metaphysical cloud,
Bearing all manner of fortune with it,
And the enraptured company of the Gods,
As well as the Damned; brass and tympany,
Their texture, all the chorale of the ancients,
With floral brow, feasting with the barbarians
Who crowd in serpentine plumes, their dreams
Of elephant, a testament at the wonder of their malevolence
Which would be their life forever barred to us,
If not having these gates through which to enter.
Thomas Bernhard’s Non-Functioning Ice Cream
For Neil Patrick Doherty
When our tongues penetrate the fervent lusciousness
Of Gelato al limon, or the unctuous smoothness of Rum
N’ Raisin, we do not stop ourselves to ask about the
Function of ice cream; what is the ‘function’ of anything?
No, instead one is saturated in sheer essence, completely
Inhabiting Be-ing, which at that particular moment in time
All temporal and spatial considerations, for once, can be
So narrowly traced to one exact point of infinity,
Compacted as they are in the merest minimum of the most
Exacting tip of tongue, lost now in the moisty moistiness
Of the overwhelmingly moist cream, or sorbet, such is
The sublimity of ice cream, causing one to lose one Self
All notions of selfhood, in that moment giving one the
Weighty momentum of buoyancy and wonder… job done!
Sumbolon
For Dee Mondschein
Here in Ephesus we dream of Ithaca.
Here in Ephesus we dream of Odysseus,
And his Dublin reincarnation as Mr. Leopold Bloom.
Despite our individual insignificance,
Together we can fabricate the greater sum of all our parts.
Dionysus, Circe, Pan or Mercury…
Each one of us is eternally resigned to recognise
In them their chosen fate, alone.
Take down the masks, try and try again
To put them on. Till, finally the one which truly
Fits, finds its face on you to pay and display!
After all, didn’t Wren himself need to do some
Salvaging for his Greenwich?
Old Joyce had his Homer for penance.
The Galway Review 