Swimming pool at the Costa Blanca and Benidorm door Hubertine Heijermans, 1997
The Swimming Pool
It goes under, the cursor, whenever I place my finger on the space bar and hold it like this for a minute. The blue screen shimmers the way a pool’s sunlit floor moves after the splash of a lone swimmer.
As long as this minute lasts, the season is somewhere between July and dawn: the soundless underwater of sandals left out overnight and garden furniture, that will end, but could just as easily go on forever.
I could be forgiven for forgetting that it was ever there. The pool is only still again when I take away my finger. Unthinking, and unable to hold its breath any longer, as much as two pages further, it comes up for air.
De Ierse dichter Conor O’Callaghan werd geboren in 1968 in Newry. Hij heeft vijf dichtbundels gepubliceerd: “The History of Rain” (1993; Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award), “Seatown” (1999), “Fiction” (2005), “The Sun King “(2013) en “Live Streaming “(2017). Hij is ook de auteur van “Red Mist: Roy Keane en de Football Civil War” (2004), een verslag van Roy Keane’s vertrek uit de FIFA World Cup-ploeg uit 2002 en de nasleep daarvan. O’Callaghan is een voormalig directeur van het Dún Laoghaire – Rathdown Poetry Now Festival en werd genomineerd voor de Poetry Now Award 2005. Hij is ook voormalig mede-houder van de Heimbold-leerstoel Irish Studies aan de Villanova University. Hij geeft momenteel lezingen aan de Sheffield Hallam University in het VK en afstandsonderwijs aan de Lancaster University. Hij ontving de Bess Hokin-prijs 2007 van het tijdschrift Poetry. O’Callaghan’s eerste roman “Nothing on Earth” werd in 2016 geprezen en stond op de shortlist voor de Ierse roman van het jaar van de Kerry Group.
Three Six Five Zero
I called up tech and got the voicemail code. It’s taken me this long to find my feet. Since last we spoke that evening it has snowed.
Fifty-four new messages. Most are old and blinking into a future months complete. I contacted tech to get my voicemail code
to hear your voice, not some bozo on the road the week of Thanksgiving dubbing me his sweet and breaking up and bleating how it snowed
the Nashville side of Chattanooga and slowed the beltway to a standstill. The radio said sleet. The kid in tech sent on my voicemail code.
I blew a night on lightening the system’s load, woke to white enveloping the trees, the street that’s blanked out by my leaving. It had snowed.
Lately others’ pasts will turn me cold. I heard out every message, pressed delete. I’d happily forget my voice, the mail, its code. We spoke at last that evening. Then it snowed.
Game Night
Love not being in the loop.
Grant the spruces’ wish, the golf compound graying out of use, suvs in the it lot, power outage, a chorus from the quad.
Bless the elsewhere where others are not here or you.
And rain after midnight . . . Ask yourself, is that rain or bells?
