Loughshinny Boathouse Residency - Peter O’Neill

Loughshinny Boathouse Artists’ Studio

Peter O’ Neill is the author of The Dublin Trilogy and The Elm Tree. He is currently the resident writer in the Loughshinny Boathouse for the spring period, thanks to the support of Fingal Arts Office. He is researching into the existence of an ancient Roman trading post, which existed in the environs there. He is also preparing for Donkey Shots 2 – Skerries Second International Avant Garde Poetry Fest which will take place from the 18th of May to the 21st. He plans to launch two new collections at the festival, Divertimento, The Muse is a Dominatrix ( mgv2>publishing, France ) and Sker ( Lapwing, Belfast ). 

Mare Nostrum



Poems written for The Loughshinny Boathouse Project

Peter O’ Neill

Acknowledgements

The poems in this cycle were all written up and during the time of my residency in the Loughshinny Boathouse Project, which was endowed upon me by Fingal Arts Office from the period of 1st March, 2016 until the end of May of the same year. I should like to take this opportunity to thank the Deputy Arts Officer, Sarah O’ Neill, and the County Arts Officer, Rory O’ Byrne, for their time and support in this project, as without it this project would have been simply unrealisable. I also want to thank the artist in residence before me, Thomas Brezing, whose hospitality and consideration for my needs were exemplary.

The brief of my project was to spend my time at the boathouse researching and doing work around the archaeological and historic evidence of an ancient Roman trading post which existed sometime around Juvenal’s time, as he mentions Ireland in his satires – AD 55- 138.

The following poems appeared in issue 43 of A New Ulster : ‘Mare Nostrum’, ‘Sansperata’, ‘2001- At Italo’s’, ‘Democracy & Freedom’, and ‘La petite morte’, 4th  March, 2016.

Page

5 Mare Nostrum

6 Sansperata

7 2001 – At Italo’s

8 Democracy & Freedom

9 La petite morte

10 Scraps

11 Baudelaire’s Albatross

All writing remains with the right of the author

Copyright © Peter O’ Neill, 2016.

CONTENTS

Mare Nostrum

nonne vides etiam guttas in saxa cadentis

umoris longo in spatio pertundera saxa?

                                         Lucretius

Your silence envelopes me like a sea,

particularly when I sit at the kitchen table.

It rushes up against me in currents,

holding me fast to the leather chair.

Hands bound, arms tied, with duct tape on

my mouth, I try to cry out but all I can

manage to hear is the thin sound of graphite,

scripting its way across the sheets.

How long can I thread water like this?

I have no idea. Like stone I endure,

weathering the oncoming waves. Erode.

Our death will be piecemeal. The slow

almost imperceptible annihilation of memory,

like water dripping, down through millennia, upon stone.

Sansperata

After Sciola

Rimbaud called for the systematic

Déréglement de tous les sens – colouring

the vowels, which you read and later heard,

echoing through the stones of the nuragi.

The sonority of granite whispers

to you with all of the tenderness

and softness of the flesh of the peaches

of Sansperata, where I wish to hear again

the stony lament in the basalt of the pips

embedded in the hill of stone structures

echoing above the silence about your lips.

This rock retains walls of sound, its spectre,

just as your hands press inwardly upon

the untraceable braille of your love.

2001 - At Italo’s

In memoriam

It was high summer, the Emperor’s month!

the temperature down on the street

was in the mid-thirties. We walked in the shade,

I following carefully your every move.

When we arrived at your father’s apartment

your whole family seemed to be there.

The television was up full volume,

Berlusconi’s beauties flew high on the trapeze.

Old and young alike clamoured.

I took a seat to sit back from it all, the casino.

Count Ugolino’s castle winked at me from its hill.

When your grandmother, almost a centenarian,

approached me with a glass of grappa.

We raised glasses before she said, “Here’s mud in your eye!”

Democracy and Freedom

Power is fluid, such is Foucault.

The body being politicised;

the zones of contention are highly

eroticised: the anus, phallus…

and the clitoris, and breasts.

Such are the hotspots, the fleshy fields

of Armageddon. We stand together

at the frontier, our guns in hand.

The tension is fraught with possibility.

Submission and domination,

who gets to rule and be ruled?

Hence our obsession with role play.

Power is fluid, the body being politicised.

Your clitoris and breasts, the keys to my deliverance.

La petite morte

The resolution of violence

is a preoccupying theme,

dictating as it must issues such as

sex, love and the many forms of death.

These days you think more often than not

of la petite morte, or the little deaths

upon climaxing; the head goes limp

only to nestle upon your shoulder.

Nature’s ergonomics. Vitruvius

In extensor! Designer living.

The perfect symmetrical fits.

Yet, such a death should be imbued

with the whole struggle to realise it;

body and soul being exhausted with the effort.

Scraps

For Thomas Brezing

A cheap notebook and a pencil,

such are the tools for this craft.

A formal impoverishment , yet

Rimbaud’s eternity flashes in the blade.

Here the sweet music of infinity lies,

hauling its cargo of radioactivity

upon a dying yet vibrant sea;

fish and bird being plastified.

Baudelaire’s albatross having

returned from the taxidermist,

his entrails now made in China.

“It has being found again.” What?

“Eternity!  It is the cut away

filet of fish with plastic chips.

Baudelaire’s Albatross

In medio ramos annosaque brancchia pandit

ulmus opaca, ingens, quam sedem Somnia vulgo

vana tenere ferunt, foliisque sub omnibus haerent. 

Virgil

Impeding wings take flight,

setting out upon the perilous road to

Loughshinny, there in the boathouse,

seated before the spectacle of the

sun-dancing on the sea’s luminous

shield, pooling there in the bay before

the rumours of the ancient Roman

trading post, in the first century AD.

Caesar, Juvenal and Tacitus

all give credence to the historical

evidence, yet here there is no mention of it!

A story shrouded in mutism and laid

out like a mummy for sheer conjecture.

Let the giants lie sleeping in the isle of Lambay.

  

The Mountain

Your profile appears, all head and hair,

Looming before me like a mountain.

Five thousand meters above sea level,

Such is the natural limit of man.

Rising any further you take your life

Into your own hands, it’s suicidal.

Mountaineers call it the death zone.

Everest is littered with poor souls.

That is where your eyes inhabit,

Engaging with mine in a deathly

Game. Temperatures rise and plummet.

The silence too is glacial.

I live or die by a look or a word,

Hanging on for dear life at the summit.

Désordre et volupté

La bohème plays intermittently

In the café, recalling the image

Of you and the promise of youth, and

Days which are made up of one hundred sheets.

Days as gentle as cotton on the skin.

The cooling fabric of our lush lives,

Lying together with the silken touch,

And the warm flesh we get lost in.

The image of your clothes hung on a chair.

Love’s iconography, their installation;

Your shirt and tights are Readymades.

The sound of your voice then and your laughter,

Exploding in the room. Both of us

Happy, fervent and promiscuous.

French Roast

The espresso cups arrive, balancing

precariously on their miniscule

shields, spoons aligned beside them

like sword. Images of weaponry

occult the mind , for the stuff is poison.

One sip being good enough to kill.

A cup of treacly muck. You want to hurl

it far from you, send it hurtling across the floor.

Instead, you sit on it, looking down on it.

The foul brew. And it makes you think of

Paris, and the other 100 000 cups like it,

which you had served up to you at some

time there. And, with attitude too.

And here they go trying to replicate it….

In medio ramos annosaque bracchia pandit

ulmus opaca, ingens, quam sedem Somnia vulgo

vana tenere ferunt, foliisque sub omnibus haerent.

multaque praeterea variorum monstra ferarum,

Centauri in foribus stabulant Scyllaeque biformes

et centumgeminus Briareus ac belua Lernae,

horrendum stridens, flammisque armata Chimaera,

Gorgones Harp