A hushed cradle on the fog-bone sea,
pulled out
in tides,
away from a shore it has never set foot on.
The sea reaches up.
Wind-formed fingers reach endless, useless –
reaching up to hear, to hold;
hold the cotton-webbed echoes of when the sky loved her,
hold them to her cheek,
everything simple, everything soft.
Brown seaweed rushes through her grey body,
broken ships and spars and cleats and line and rigging fall in the forgetting deep;
death does his shuddered work.
She pulls as strongly as she can – weakly –
her fingers and arms and heartbeat crash on the cradle,
she needs to hold, to hear –
The hushed cradle rocks in the screaming sea.
–
Amber flows through a keyhole,
pierces the sawdust and cigarette smoke,
finds a man with wine-dark eyes
holding birchwood, shaping it with chisel and hammer.
He releases form from the wood as he runs his calloused hands over it, finding curves
where there were none before,
and woodchips
tremble,
tremble,
fall.
He breathes in the wood’s body as he releases it into form,
and stares at what he now holds,
a cradle made of birch.
–
When the sun would fall to its knees and the light became blue and dark,
the sea would rise as the sky would fall
and gasp each other
with a sad – angry – ecstasy and clamor.
Struggled moans and
broken pages
of what holds the stars
and moon
would fall away
they would kick off the night’s blanket –
their damp breath pulled close around instead.
The wind from the sky’s fingers spoke ships across her body,
and the sand gave her thighs something to rest on as his mouth traced the outlines of her mouth, her chest, her stomach, and then lips met lips and his open tongue flut-tered in the flood –
One night, the sky did not meet her rising.
All love must come to this, she told herself,
every bloom carries a trailing,
knocking rotting.
But now, as she looks up at the cradle –
she looks up and sees the sky empty.
He was not torn, he was not taken.
He left.
Salt floods again to her beaches; she dissolves between the fragments.
And the hushed cradle rocks in the empty sea.
–
The old man sits in a barroom
full of people drinking patiently,
he hastily stuffs his eyes into his stained jacket pocket –
the pocket like a curtain falling over them and
But they were once wine-dark and handsome.
He sits, arthritis mixing his words,
a mouth filled with dusty lips,
ears candled by straining through the silence,
a shaking stool
and shaking hands,
another drunk going with wet lips and hairy pits to dementia.
But he was once and handsome.
The crying, laughing lord of a ruined city,
since he lost the cradle.
He still wonders where it went, its nameless paths that – maybe – he had taken too,
if it too was carried to a burning river,
if it too held on to things it never needed,
if it too was carried by rage from the fallen things it should have held on to,
if it too let its blood dance silver beneath the moonlight,
if it too-
He picks his broken head up off the bar,
finishes his drink and walks out into the night,
wine-dark and handsome,
under the unnoticed stars.
–
The hushed cradle
holds the edges of the shore
and the enormous sky.
A stretching boy
finds his footing in the
reflected stars on the wet sand
and walks into the heaving forest.
R. P. O’Donnell was born in 1992 and raised in a Boston suburb. He attended Bucknell University and graduated with a BA in English. Rob has lived in most of the states – longest in Iowa, Colorado and Texas. He has worked as a garbageman, in an ER, on a magazine, for a nomadic yard-sale salesman; he has now moved permanently to a small fishing village in West Cork. The Irish Examiner recently published his first feature article.