Three Poems by Sean O’Brien

Blue Window

‘the horror of aesthetics’ — Douglas Dunn

Blue window pouring down into the room
to ride this surf of smoking light
until it breaks against the furniture

and round our ankles. I can quite believe it.
Nothing is impossible, as witness me
about to edit Ugolino’s table-talk,

complete with tasting notes. Best eaten cold.
Or there’s that group of scrunty hawthorns
stooping at the ditch-line in the blast

across the Durham steppe, their gaze
averted from the train — like peasants
spying mounted Florentines, like nymphs

turned crones to duck the god’s attention.
All the while, the waterfall of light
continues in the house beside the sea,

until the windows are inseparable from water
and the breaking wave’s a blessing
nothing warrants, breaking none the less.

Lines on a Young Lady’s Record Collection

‘Heard melodies are sweet’

I turned these up among your grave-goods, love.
Here’s Bless the Weather, played to death
like Buckley’s ‘Sweet Surrender’. Did I never

tell you I heard him do it live
a week before the overdose, although
the early work remains superior of course?

Forgive me. You weren’t listening anyway,
and all day long your music rolled in waves —
The Goldberg Variations, Blue and Desertshore —

towards a silence there was no foretelling,
meant for boxing-up and clearing out,
while your beloved melodies, long since

imaginary, surge into the ear
like sand disturbed by trespassers,
to inundate the silence of the grave.

Provincial Monsters

Dear provincial monsters
oozing from their mausolea,
up the stairs and through the keyhole,
pausing to reconstitute
before they do the business —
where would we be without them?
Who would terrorize the fen?
Extirpate them? Burn the records?
What then, I ask, what then?

Sean O’Brien’s eleventh collection, Embark, was published last year. His work has received various awards, including the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes and the 2020 Peking Com Arts Poetry Award. A chapbook, Impasse: For Jules Maigret, is forthcoming from Hercules Editions. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.