My Mother Hoped for the Best
My mother would pause in her sweeping
and lean on the brush to listen
when Bridie Gallagher’s voice trilled from the wireless,
her sentimental lilt filling the kitchen with Moonlight in Mayo.
My mother sang along with the same musing air I noticed
when, twice a year, the good tea set was taken from the dresser,
bone china delft, white, rimmed with red roses to be washed in suds:
thirty pieces all intact,
something entire and unbroken in her unlikely possession,
tableware preserved for some elusive best occasion.
She was all set
for some vague, beyond-the-horizon possibility of a visitor.
A capable hostess, ready to entertain that same exotic someone
who’d sleep between the flannelette sheets,
still in cellophane in the trunk in the loft
with the candlewick bedspread ridged with roses,
saved for with endless books of Green Shield Stamps,
her epic commitment to thrift.
We too must have hoped for this ‘best time’
when someone, connected to us, would pass
triumphant and grand through our door,
someone you couldn’t expect to drink from a mug
or tighten themselves into a ball for heat
under a pile of old coats on the bed.
Tender Whiteness
(i.m Tadhg, 2016-2022)
We are taking our cat to the vet in his hated cat carrier
for the last time.
The disease has dulled his agate eye to marble,
reduced him to a handful of mottle and scab, a serrated backbone,
a creature hiding out, inert amongst hats and scarves in a drawer.
No resistance when the vet carries him away
to the back room in a towel smelling earthy-dense of Valerian.
Here she shaves the mackerel-tabby pattern of his paw
to a patch of such tender whiteness, upsets the symmetry
of his markings to expose the vein,
returns him to us for the final injection.
Six years of him: dead mice at the door,
tea towels thrown over the panic and flutter
of stunned birds in the kitchen,
his light pounce on the bed,
whiskers and purring and kneading paws,
nudging books and newspapers out of his way.
He was a curl and a comma on chairs and shelves, under bushes,
a colony knave who’d lick the butter, feral and feisty for all our rescuing.
The vet is sorry for our loss, the cashier warns
of the empty feeling in the house, the hollow dips in cushions.
We drive home the long way in failing light,
flinch from the surreal quietness,
expect the light tip of him around the corner,
sense him slip sable and silver from the top of the wardrobe.
The Cocktail Hour
When the ‘soft’ son from the Big House suggested
that Josie Kenny, the cleaner, take a break
from the mop and bucket and enjoy
a glass of sherry with him in the conservatory,
his mother nearly choked on the possibility
that Josie, from the cottages, would tip
a schooner of their best olorosa down her gullet,
while filling the lad’s head with nonsense about feeding a fox
or rescuing kittens from a rubbish bin.
She flapped the chap to panicked silence,
drew an air knife across her throat,
mimed the wringing of his neck.
Josie laughed to herself as she cycled down the avenue
at the incongruity of the three of them
getting plastered on the Tio Pepe in the Big House,
a mansion protected by stone lions,
their eye sockets vacant, their ears chipped, their teeth blunt.
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(Photo: Asbjørn Floden/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- Three Poems by Margaret Galvin - April 20, 2023