HoboEye Poetry:
Kate Falvey, New York, USA


In Kitty Liffey’s Bar and Grill, Second Act

What do you want me to tell about?
Her ghastly creaking joints?
The constant pussy willow
grazing the upright piano leg?
Lavendar soap smell gasping
out of her rubbed pink skin?
I can’t remember.
Her maiden name was Hackett.

Tying a knot
in order to suspend
green garland, bayberry,
pine cones, calico ribbons
with fierce cut edges
is difficult
when the knuckles lump
into constraint.
You’re a tall boy, Cody Kilbride.
Knock that wreath into the wall
for me
there
above the witness-angel
on the crèche.

Everything smells like chicken
roasting, the blue tiles glazed
with the yellow sound of bursting skin.
I watch her sear the few
pinfeathers off the scrawny jagged wings,
pinch closed the neck flap, rub deep
into the splitting ribs with salt,
with traces of greenish herbs.

A young boy of long ago
watched earnestly
a turkey being pat
with a red checked towel,
tenderly scraped
of residual bird-life,
watched a delicate oyster stuffing
being coaxed into the gape
of body socket, watched keenly
the trussing with familiar package cord
and somehow
fell in love.
He would not leave
the old white oven,
split streams of escaping bird
rollicking against
its glass window.
He lived
for hours
in a closed world
in splendid, perfect
anticipation of
bird-triumph, perhaps.
A head
would sprout,
orange darts would break off
from the flames
and resolve themselves
as feathers,
wings would unbolt, heave
open the gripped cords
out of the simplest need
to fan away the heat.
It would be so.
Perhaps he thought this.
Hands came, of course,
slid the grizzled thing
onto a pinklipped parslied platter,
guided the boy with bemused,  befuddled pats
to the outreach of the linened table.
When the best
pearl-handled knife
blasted itself into
the crisp hump of bird flesh,
the boy watched
the motion of the breast wriggling
out from the knife,
loosed his unknowing grip
on the polished fork handle,
squeezed his fist
around the silver prongs,
held on hard
for a wondering instant,
screamed,
and never spoke again.

Pat said he would drink ‘til dawn
and go to her wake with hobs and the Sidhe
as his guests.
He would put on a blue suit
and let the banshee loose among the solemn
stockinged rows, raise
ragweed in the neat wreath-portions,
and jig his hands inside the stillness of her
young bleached casket.
He would even
if he felt moved to it
tweak her stiff bloodless nipple
and kick the sympathetic priest
in his blanched believing throat.

Don’t be selfish, Cody.
Let baby Harry use your train.

Mea…..

Hum. Hum. Hum. Hum.
Hand the brass burner with its
heaving chain into Father Brody’s heavy palms.
Angel hair caught fire,
the smell of the ancients
swaggered out, clussshhh
over the brass handles.
Singed darkness.
Burnt feathers of prayers riding up.
Roil back to dust bolted in this
sturdy cushioned house. Hum. Hum.
If I pull the brass handle
Mr. Meglin’s scalp will come apart.
(But, Mother, how can he hear his penance if he’s deaf?)

There are two happy people in the world:
Pat’s brother, Gabe, and Gabe’s nice wife, Melody.
Then Gabe couldn’t balance his blue coffee mug,
sprung his soft egg out of its sunny cup.

Mother, why does God make imbeciles?
(Why does God make baby brothers?)

Listen, my friend, Michael, found me
a book
of first-class perpetual poems
clogged in a stranded cardboard box
underneath stacks of dust and
split threads of reddish undependable covers,
wedged between skids and fillips of words
on pilots and parachutes, firemen, football,
the dawn’s creaking early light.
I needed it
 so bad.
Mike – buddy –
Buddy – how’d ya know?

Mother, why does God make gonads?

A Bud?
A degenerate vessel of gin?
A grace note of dreampink wine?
Eileen, I’ll pay.
Alright?

On me.


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