THREAD
  
"For example, he discovered that one old lady,
who had spent the fifty years of her incarceration
on the Burgholzli making stitching movements
as if she was sewing shoes, had been jilted
by her lover just before she became ill:
as Jung was able to discover, he was a cobbler."
                  
                                            Anthony Stevens


The shoe will not keep away the world
any more than the parting
air is sewn by the retreating stream
which is her sole succour
from that day's taste which has never left her;
her weaving is a vain spitting out.
Although she knows the watching face is kind,
the rhythmic, soothing phrase is a babble of the dead.
  
Suddenly sun floods the room with sense,
her hand stilled above her head,
dust and insects dance unconducted
and in this heartbreaking
ravelling, every other afternoon
those fifty years past, floats like honey
or the pained, remembered small of leather,
time reasserted in its own annihilation.
  
The gesture is a gesture again,
the arm tired, the muscle sore
with a freshness that holds every ache
not yet experienced
and because to come, ever negated.
She is back in the safe, work-lit womb
of the cobbler's shop, warm with promises
and the dizzy, assuring freedom of betrothal.
  
It passes. Light is a reprieve,
her hands begin the long swim
into grace, into muddied meaning.
Winter falls, but gently,
the small glitter in her eyes is the last
mirroring of that short, shadowed life;
if she lives, she will walk among the buds,
her arms breaking the mimed silence of wall and still shrub.

AMMONITE

Students, guitars, garlands. Such heat
that even in the portico leaves go limp
before the last whirr of the camera.
A couple, newly graduated, step
from an alcove, as from another century.
The young are discovering the ancient
as we before, as if they’d invented it.
A strange, heady mix, the language
and laughter of optimism: for a moment,
better than the sun. But on turning
toward the street, all becomes instantly
oppressive, the breath arid, the ground
threatening blisters.

And so, again, into the cool
of the geological museum. A nod
from the desk, a high doorway, and everything
is eighteen-eighties – dark wood, glass, air
still yet charged with the shock
of the first discovery – this is what the world
was like without us. Yes, this is where
we come, fascinated above all by how
meaningless we are. No pottery, no pared flint,
a bird’s egg more than football-sized,
petrified thighs like pillars, slips of yellowed
paper, a hundred million years in casual copperplate.
It’s like looking at the stars without becoming dizzy.

More silent than a church, these long rooms
rarely visited, untouchable relics older
than any god we could imagine -
how we wish we could remain solid
forever, some part of us, tooth, vertebrae.
It can stop us in our tracks, knowing
a fragment of a claw will be more alive
than we in a handful of hundred years;
the way an edifice dedicated to time
annihilates time, while neighbouring cathedrals
do the opposite. How the same space
reigns in both.

But here, no sun.
How would it be to touch like Midas
the oldest ammonite and make it blaze?
Why are we like children, 
drawn to the gilt; why feel so keenly
the lack of gold leaf? Suddenly these rooms 
are, more than anything, unadorned,
maybe the thirst for knowledge
is no more than that – the same recurring dryness
we feel on waking to an empty day.
The partygoers have moved off; they pass,
processing. One of them breaks into song,
brittle, sharp, and joyous. The medieval gate
is on the edge of earshot; a timbrel beat, no more,
as I step out and midday bites the eyes.

Ted Mc Carthy is a poet and translator living in Clones, Ireland. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada and Australia. He has had two collections published, ‘November Wedding’, and ‘Beverly Downs’. His work can be found on www.tedmccarthyspoetry.weebly.com