Rebecca O’Connor

About a dozen tangerines
fell out of my blue shopping bag
and rolled down the bus aisle.
That made them smile,
though it was only a bag of tangerines
rolling down the aisle.
A gentleman in a white tunic
handed me four at a time,
the lady next to me stooped down
and scooped up a few,
the bus driver slowed right down:
“Are they limes?” “No,
they’re mandarins, tangerines -
a little bruised now.”

With the Icelandic waves rolling in my chest
and the sound of your steps on the snowy beach
I lay down to sleep last night
on my creased bed.
I dreamt you and I were a kiss:
time, all time. Then you made a sandcastle of yourself.
Later I plunged the depths
and couldn’t see what anything meant -
just food for fish and smaller fish and smaller fish.
All I know now is,
even if I have nothing else,
I have this -
all the nothing that it is.

We walked to Narin Island
across the ripple-bed of the sea,
the flat fish kissing the arches of our feet.
In the prickling heat we
crossed the island cemetery
into the bull’s thistle field,
where I could smell your salt,
and the sea’s, and
the burning grass.
The tide moved in swiftly,
sinking our path into
its hornwracks:
our feet were soft shells
skimming
over the mirror image of ourselves.

As I drove home through Toome, Blackstaff, Swan’s Cross
and the rain, always the rain, I thought of our names
tangled in a hook of letters in the visitor’s book at Inniskeen,
your absence keening, as it always will,
under the creak of upturned boats from the Fane.
You would have liked the wedding party photo,
his look tilted as the whiskey glass in his hand,
landlocked between his dour bride and the manacled faces
of those who were said to have made him drunk
so’s he wouldn’t change his mind.
Outside, his grave with the stepping stones of his childhood -
his brother’s need to mark him there, like mine to mark you here.
Inside, his death mask gazing into the prows on the ceiling
as if he were looking down from a stellar height on a flooded plain.

... and if the wind should lift me
and carry me out to sea
I shall cast shadows
across your homeland
and your heart,
and scream with the wind, drowning
in the depths of the sea
that kept us apart,
drowning in the pool at Godmersham,
the Cork cove, under the cliffs
of the Bloody Foreland, the high rise car park
of the San Sebastian gravel and sands ...

This must mean much more to me than I feel -
to have my mother here with me, and my brothers,
walking the same stretch of beach where, as children,
we trawled the rock pools like gods,
goading crabs and luminous fairy shrimp.
The furze in the dunes, saddlebags of bloated kibble,
blenny, a dogfish wishing itself back into the wash,
the names Saleen, Gorey, Tara Hill, the seal family
marking the timeliness of our return,
and our aunt Lily still living. All of us
living! Stretching ourselves out in the dunes,
we wait for the retreating tide to reveal molten caves
and leave the dogfish stranded on dry sand,
staring eternally at the sea, as they’re known to do their prey.