Conor O'Callaghan

the stars The nights midweek are secrets kept. No soul on site, no signal/bars, and zilch for company except a zillion bright disarming stars. I’ll flit through ambers, quicker, higher. I’ll break each hamlet’s stop or yield. I’ll fix some noodles, start a fire and climb up to the topmost field. The stars at first are sparse, unclear. They surface in that drag between the darkened grass and stratosphere, of powder blue and bottle green. They blossom, thick and fast, in droves. They pulse, in clusters, magnify. The smoke that’s my potbelly stove’s frays outwards through each needle eye. I’ll head below. I’ll char till dawn some apple logs down to their core. By pewter light when stars have gone, I’ll do a bit, a little more. the rain You live inside its sound effects whole weeks on end: its pin machine, its cardboard drum, its soft-boiled eggs, its silent running submarine. It’s like the god of liquid rub- ber stirred at dawn to slip downstairs and sip a cigarette, to drub his fingertips on solid layers you poured across last summer’s drought. You love it, learn to, as it slows, and even as you come to doubt its dribs and drabs and pigeon toes. Forget the welcome rain outstayed. For days the leaves are parchment sheet and wind hangs chimeless in the shade. Still rain remains the point of heat. The rain is near. Like everything, it’s best those seconds just before: the broadleaf ’s backwards canvas sling, the fly strip flapping through the door. the wind The wind’s this ancient bloke below who chunters “we,” who wheezes “us,” though no one else will come or go. You want to ask the wind “Who’s us?” but hold your tongue till, in your head, the wind and him have somehow mixed, the type of wind that loves a shed and banging on of things not fixed: a belt-and-braces year-round wind, a kiln-dried cobwebbed hardwood wind, a greenhouse wind, a treebound wind, an end-of-season car-boot wind, a padlocked shower unit wind, an upturned wheelie dumpster wind, a channel not quite tuned-in wind, a hollow flight-path thunder wind, a dog-eared wind, a knocked-sign wind, a spouseless phantom ocean-blown autumnal graveyard Scots pine wind who speaks in plurals, moves alone. the grass One night last June, in cups, in love with pickled gin from bubbly flutes, our clothes in coils about the stove, we climbed the dark in birthday suits. It’s true! The grass was mown that day. Like hippies chained in meadow flowers, we tripped above the cut and lay in blades of petrol suede for hours. We listened to the lowing black. We giggled, kissed. We possumed dead. We woke as flesh and straggled back like beasts for parlor, dressed, then read. We trafficked grass in bedspreads, shoes, and never spoke of that again through winter’s interregnum blues, of being spooked by skin, of when the only care we had was grass, the only stir for miles around our freezing bones, our clinking glass, our dying to be rumbled, found.

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.

A Tick-Where-Appropriate Template It begins with unspecified “you” and “we” raising fists of defiance to the void, the morning we opened the obituary, a pun on “decompose” you’d have enjoyed. These crocodile tears shed in rhyme, in an age too commercial to care, recall how we met the first time and the feisty old trooper you were, you were, what a feisty old trooper you were: the snook you cocked at convention; writing only when the muse was near your solitary published collection, Parnassus — A Calling Not a Career , we reviewed and/or said we admired: its allusions to myth, its classical power we found “inspiring” if not “inspired” and “important” as a euphemism for “dour,” for “dour,” important to find euphemisms for “dour”; your committee work; your taste in shoes; your alcoholism and/or love for jazz; your appetite for social issues that none of the young crowd has; your impatience with those smart alecks who expect to have and eat their cake, and some daringly inverted syntax the occasional end-rhyme to make, to make, occasionally an end-rhyme you’d make; your insistence upon a thing called “craft” (perhaps you meant margarine); how establishment critics originally laughed at your pamphlets from the Slovene; how you very nearly popped your clogs as we fought to get your name cleared; you were our stag set upon by dogs, indestructible in duffel coat and/or beard, your beard, the indescribable duffel coat and/or beard; your years of silence and/or second wife whose whereabouts remain uncertain; a paean to your flowering late in life in some council flat in Suburbiton and your dab hand with a hoover seasoned with the odd gratuitous clue (much as we champion your oeuvre) that we’re better writers than you, than you, we’re better writers than you; the valedictions when last we met— “Shut the door, comrades, adieu”— however innocuous when said, now seem prophetic: you knew ; your despair and/or your courage; a warning for our planet and times culminating with a rhetorical flourish that pans out along these lines, these lines, that pads out along these lines: Something something something world , something something something grope . Something something something unfurled , something something something hope . Something something something dark , something something something night . Something something something lark , something something something light .

It needn’t be tinder, this juncture of the year, a cigarette second guessed from car to brush. The woods’ parchment is given to cracking asunder the first puff of wind. Yesterday a big sycamore came across First and Hawthorne and is there yet. The papers say it has to happen, if just as dribs and drabs on the asbestos siding. But tonight is buckets of stars as hard and dry as dimes. A month’s supper things stacks in the sink. Tea brews from water stoppered in the bath and any thirst carried forward is quenched thinking you, piece by piece, an Xmas gift hidden and found weeks after: the ribbon, the box. I have reservoirs of want enough to freeze many nights over.

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?