Jonathan is a writer and graphic designer. His poetry explores family, love and the slippery nature of memory. He is a member of Polyphonic, an international collective of artists working together in spoken word, live music and dance. In 2016 he founded NOAKE, a full-service design studio for the arts.
Caruso
Pressed between pages of a Simenon
novel pulled from my studio bookshelves,
a photograph of you and me laughing
behind empties at the Golden Lion.
It slips free, drifts down to settle oddly
by my bare feet on terracotta tiles.
I push it about with a toe then stoop
for a closer look at our pinked faces.
Ha! The hot night you climbed a stool and sang
Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen to the room.
We roared down the landlord, threw beer and
kisses in the smoke, shining wild. I drank
you down on those nights, knowing one day you
would be gone and cold, somewhere out of reach.
Macushla
We would meet at The French House
for a half, jammed in tight with the yammer.
Holding forth in blue smoke under reaching hands,
our golden spot to the left of the bar was somehow
quietened by the closeness of our faces.
It was never just a half though, always night
outside when we rose to button coats.
A giveaway sway in our push along the wet
pavement to Centrales for Spaghetti Milanese
and more talk on elbows under bright lights.
Then down to a westbound tube or sometimes
a cry for music would send us on the hunt.
The night we got a late table at Ronnie Scott’s
I caught your wine-shined-eyes brimming as the
old boy sung Macushla through cupped hands.
We both felt the magic of 3am on Frith Street,
buttered lights dipped in oil-dark puddles.
There’d be eggs at Balans, or one for the road,
and from the top deck I would watch it all fall away
as you snored straight through to the Common.
4am
After he died, my mother moved away. She found a place
to live, by a slow flowing river. She hung his paintings
on the wall. Her rooms are modest and still, a salmon pink
tamarisk shimmers behind the bedroom window.
There are three clocks on her nightstand that tell different times,
ticking softly by framed photographs and bottles of bright
coloured pills. A lacquered carmine jewellery box lined with
ochre silk holds blond locks, milk teeth, crayon stickman drawings.
I check on her during the night, looking in from the door.
She sleeps veiled by the landing’s copper light, body awry,
blankets kicked away. Her knees are drawn high up into a
twisted nightgown. Both scrawny hands are taloned, thrown out in
some grotesque prayer. A dumb breath aches from her wide open mouth.
I fall back, turn away, head downstairs, hold onto the sink.
Moonwalk
Green check dummies in Farlow’s window
haul me back to that Listowel afternoon,
when you pulled over and togged up
for an hour of fishing on the Feale.
A palaver of rods, reels, waders, nets.
Your vest, cap, glasses, bag,
canvas, Gortex, tweed, leather, lead.
We ate marmalade sandwiches on the bridge,
watched you head to the bank,
an astronaut walking on the moon.
You got looks from locals, dotted gull-like
on rocks, having a cast as daily bread,
in chef’s whites, hobnails, painting overalls.
Nearing the fast flow in slow motion,
your boot caught a root, casting you
headfirst into the reedy deep.
And off – a bobbing otter –
downstream in all your angling finery.
Was the water wet for you there?
asked the lad who fished you out.
You sat, shining – a landed trout –
leaking on the nettled bank.
You laughed so hard we thought
you might do yourself a mischief.
Sundays
For some years my mother worked
on Saturday nights, nursing.
She would sleep through Sunday’s
aimless hush, and my father and I
would be left to each other.
Nothing was hurried in his
studio’s narcotic warmth,
my comic books spread about,
while he pottered and painted,
or tied flies for fishing.
When it was time he would open
one tin of rice pudding,
and one tin of prunes in syrup.
Carefully shared between two blue bowls,
we’d eat with the radio playing.
After his coffee and doze we would walk,
my hand in his, rough and warm,
across the pockmarked mud of
Gunnersbury’s empty rugby fields,
to see what was what at the fishing pond.
I have no memory of the words
we spoke, or how old I was then,
but this is how Sundays passed
during the time my mother nursed
on Saturday nights.
Boy
I have a boy of my own now.
He sprawls across everything,
booms through our rooms,
untamed and highly flammable.
He has grown to such a height.
Sometimes when I am riding my bike
I see him on the corner.
Him and his band of scallywags,
all low slung and full of it.
And he is wearing my shoes.
I peddle fast so as not to be seen.
When he crashes in late again
for a supper that has withered
and died in the pot, drinking
fierce and long from the kitchen tap,
I ask, casual like, how his day has been.
He grunts, he shrugs, he pushes
more ruined food into his face,
he wipes his mouth with the
back of a sleeve.
I sit across from him,
and he is as far away
as the farthest
blazing star.