Articles of Association

By Tony Uhlemann

These poems, written over a thirty-year period, have a common thread running through all of them. That thread is the author: the person and the writer. The term articles of association is a legal one. It has a precise definition, but I have used it in a very loose and affectionate way. These poems are about nonphysical possessions, be they as mundane as a particular day or a favorite writer or as complicated as my relationship with my father. They have in some little or large way associated themselves to me, for better or for worse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Feb 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524597641

Tony Uhlemann

Tony Uhlemann lives in Bray, Co. Wicklow. This is his second book of poems. His first, Living on Amber, was published in 2009.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Tony Uhlemann.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5245-9765-8

              eBook           978-1-5245-9764-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 02/02/2017

Xlibris

800-056-3182

www.Xlibrispublishing.co.uk

753088

Contents

My Father’s House

Dunmore East

108 Ardmore Park

Growth

Leeson Street 1

Leeson Street 2

On Writing #2

Linda

A Boy’s Own Room

Raymond Carver. 1939–1988

Marilane

Good Friday 1985

St. Patrick’s Day 1992

Little Sunday

Sanctuary

Whirlwind

Dad

Looking after Superquinn

Sonnets from Ballycastle

Coming Home in Twilight

Outed

The Lovin’ Spoonful

Patchouli

To Lorna Reid

Altered View

A Poem in the Shape of the Buddha

Articles of Association

Revelation Song

On Writing #1

Pretty Damn Close

Proxy Love

Dylan Thomas

Something

Passion Killer

A Perfect Match

Communion

Words of Love

Oatlands College #1

Late September Summer Song

Writing Daze

Bob Dylan

Big Trouble on Bray Beach

Patrick Kavanagh

Swifts

The Night Ferry

Deerpark Road, Noises Off

A Quick Flash

Robert Lowell

Kilcoole Beach

William Faulkner

Tribe

Penelope Fitzgerald

Mount Merrion Woods

St. Stephen’s Green

Butterfly Blues

Jim Morrison

Words of Love

Itch

Young

This Man’s Love

Infidel

Derek Mahon

Separate Self & Co.

Eddie

Sometimes We Danced

Nightlines #1

Red Sky at Morning

High Summers

Jack Kerouac

Saturday at Intel

Saturday at Duffs

This Bright Day

Smothered

The Nurseries 07/07

Untitled #6

A Leave-Taking

Eloquently Empty

Sunday: All That Jazz

St. Patrick’s Eve 2002

Nailing It

Sylvia Plath

Waterford 07/07

Keith Jarrett

Four Songs for Four Places Where I Spent a Lot of Time but Never Set Foot

Marina Tsvetaeva

John Ashbery

Tyke

Missa Solemnis at the Harbour Bar

Confinement

Pollock

The Sixties #1

Hemingway

Miró

Pissing Blood

The Night Patrol

Hafners Sausages

Paul

A Dorset Wedding

Touching the Cornflower. Touching the Bell

T.S. Eliot

Some Time in the Hinterland

01. 10. 2000

Sunday Security

Knight Errant

This book is

dedicated to my wife Linda

but also to Ciara, Aran, Sam, Brad, Jodie,

Samantha, Sam, Matthew, Ryan, Karl, Leah

and Hannah. I love them all.

Thanks to Annie, Jade, Joseph and all at Xlibris for

changing what I thought was going to be a daunting prospect

into a very satisfying and informative journey. Consumate

professionals all.

Thanks to Steve Johnston for letting me use his Man

with Paintings picture.

My Father’s House

On the walls are his father’s paintings:

fading gardenias in a pottery bowl,

an ornate archway in a foreign town,

snow scenes from the German lands.

The stillness of the paintings

matching the sound of the clock

and the perfect curve of the linoleum

as it wraps around each step

of those narrow, daunting stairs.

A hat on a hat rack

and beneath, a coat of brown,

look somehow senseless and absurd.

The gnarled walking stick will stay

as a door closes upstairs and silence

becomes exactly what it says.

I have a hand here

and maybe a squinting eye.

A child’s hand and a woman’s eye.

That door will never usher life

into this little picture.

It is locked tight, but

I own it.

1992

Dunmore East

Armistice declared.

Sea and the sands

retreat as waves

land benignly on the strand.

Two cormorants draw two lines

over a serene sea.

Craggy rocks eye each other

impotently across a bay

of well-ordered idle water.

Summer. Late summer.

Not quite what the Yanks

call fall.

Declarations from jackdaws

get lost in the belligerent clamour

of cliff-bound kittiwakes. Their

din gyrates about the harbour,

from wharf to quay to wall.

The cardinal points of compass

still hold true. Under this sky,

a helmet of blue above; matching

blue below, what is camouflaged

is what everybody can identify.

Afternoon. In an illicit

white rowing boat, two boys

sit all at sea under

a lukewarm sun and

watch the shoreline bob up

and down. Up and down.

No one drowns

in this placid arena.

No one ever will.

1994

108 Ardmore Park

And Wittgenstein in the Loo!

Family lines were drawn here.

Fine lines. So fine at times

you’d trip without your knowing.

A redoubt of hospitality

and unconditional acceptance

now no longer across the road.

"We have the spare room. You’ll

always have a bed," Deirdre says.

What do you take from such a place

where you never had a bed

but always space to ease your head

with common talk, uncommon words?

Simply memories? Surely not?

Unless memories reimburse loss, or

recollections indemnify grief?

Intractable facts cannot pass,

without a nod, to be logged

as mere mnemonic. These facts are

photographs but moving too:

The Director deck chairs, a pair,

much fought over but now

simply sun-dried extras,

cast in the garden shed.

The Whore’s Room painted purple,

second-hand cast iron bed.

"What’s the big mirror for?

Shouldn’t it be overhead?"

Spanish names. Italian students.

Confirmations, unholy Communions,

full of the impudent use of booze.

Vitality breeding vividness,

and Wittgenstein in the loo.

Three generations at a Sunday

dinner table. Talking in chorus.

No pauses, no offence, no finale.

Books, insulation-like, lining walls,

sidling stairs, coating the hall.

Poetry, biography, rows and stacks.

Novels of fiction, books of facts.

Joyce, Sontag, Matisse, Yeats.

No classification. No progression.

The Art of Rhetoric next to Crow.

Unalphabetised, too, so you had

to seek and in searching find what

you’d been missing for years.

Music, too, moves with us.

A continuously composing score,

tracking choirs of children’s voices,

adults differing, pontificating.

Comforts being granted,

qualms being calmed while Dylan sang

or The Bothy Band, Jacques Brel, Bree Harris, Christy Moore.

Put Gene Pitney on for the craic.

Music as background, music as muse,

and Wittgenstein too, in the loo.

"Whereof one cannot speak

thereof one must be silent."

Memory and fact have no such pact.

Wistfulness or actuality, it matters

not a jot. We took for a while

what we thought we had got

by right, and our silence now

is neither statement nor rule

of thumb. The pain of

parting renders us dumb,

but not beyond inflection.

"Is that Wittgenstein still in the loo?"

1999

Growth

A stretch of light in the night;

not quite what was required but

beggars and all that.

Squatting like a toad

on the side of the road,

beneath the last street light,

not far from the house

you like to call home.

I knew I couldn’t hold my breath for long.

Bedecked in second-hand clothes;

surplus army stock,

stripped of their colours,

demobbed but not derailed,

I was prepared to sweat it out.

The only path rose up

as far as I could see.

Yellow light steps down

from your window, brick

by brick by brick, and I count them

over and over.

I know you are up there,

comb, comb, combing

your petulant hair

into unnecessary perfection, or

cast upon your bed,

limb kissing limb. Or are you asleep?

Can I call and interrupt your dreams?

Or better yet, may

I massage your breasts till

your nipples harden

as your blood darkens with need?

These thoughts do not protect me.

Out of sight, you might

make concessions, so I

peer into the tight confines

of all possible paths

for routes of absolute choice.

The hollow night rocks me,

and rocking with it, I hear you laugh.

"Why remember words? That’s

what dictionaries are for."

The flights we discussed were

only options without thought.

Breakaways not getaways;

lines of logic that you had traced.

Two and two, like, make four. Okay?

But the hand that did the taking

was not the hand that I held.

That hand would forever rob me.

Still,

I loved what you did

with your hair.

1991

Leeson Street 1

Night has hushed the centrefolds of the city.

One lies where she was laid. Cinderella in a

a tight blue dress. Both shoes intact.

Pity turns a blind eye to the pretty benign lepers

who prance in limbless dance and have the town

in stitches. Out there, cold prowlers are drawn

to dark alleys. A dawn mere moments away

hesitates, it seems. Waiting for an official

Come hither? Hot dog hawkers cram their goods

with mustard as a string of drunken gawkers watch

and chew coleslaw and doubtful doughy loaves.

Morning creeps upon them all, door by door.

Unoccupied rooms, steamy windows, no view.

Litter flits off down the street as Gardai on the

early-morning beat cast cold clean eyes on this

alien environs and act as though they could hurt.

Club doors are shut so tight against the light

that no nod or password will see them open.

The violence of the night has sweetly ceased.

Light showers being the weather forecast,

umbrellas and soaking shoes

will soon, like day,

hold sway.

1991

Leeson Street 2

Monitoring thoughtful mornings.

Measuring lapses in the continuum

of the unstoppable run of days.

Appending solid values

to moronic half-turns

and asides of doubtful character,

with plain but dubious intent.

Hell-bent on acquiring points;

ointment of the static heart.

Rooftops take the sun

then blend greyly as a shadow

stalks the street in the rain,

like a hooker on her beat.

My lingering eyes

prise curtains open

to catch a soundless glimpse

of lives, like mine,

encased in concrete and regret.

Or better yet, I scan the street

from my single office seat

and watch the comings and goings

of those who cross the road of my

irresponsible prying eyes.

Each one, surprisingly, fitting

each name I, in my ultimate care

and cold wisdom, append.

1991

On Writing #2

Alone in my room. T-shirt, shorts. Feeling

warm. Mulling over words. Which is best?

Which one to use? The doorbell shocks a

silent house. Disturbed, I rudely open our

front door. Three faces. The oldest, twelve?

The youngest maybe four. Thin, ragged,

undersized, and underfed. But with

faces hard, Christ, even knowing.

Proffering a tatty note, one instructs,

Read this, mistur.

A badly scrawled begging letter

signed a mother.

I hand them change and watch them count it

before one says, God bless you, Sir,

with an ease that shafts each word.

Then it’s back to the wordy word games.

Back to the tower.

Back to memories dug up to splice

and thrice splice in