SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Seven
PATTRICK DEELEY
Magpie Potential
The cloak requires to be worn lightly.
You cope with its invisibility
and, trying it on for size, dip your hands
in its deep pockets until they
smuggle up four eggs of lustrous blue,
brown-spotted, the same eggs
you climbed to find in Ballydoogan wood
in your barefoot childhood.
One by one you put the eggs
to your ear, amazed to hear from each
the whir of magpie potential.
Gently you bed them back down, hoping
for wingtips to sprout, bodies
and legs and darkly the eyes
and cowled heads to come about.
Hoping – who knows? – for feathered
iridescence, even for flight,
and your life of hoard-need, of reining in,
of fear that you might fail,
seems only a grounding for this
exuberant scatter and go. You withdraw
your hands, but all is empty now,
and clay, make of it what you
will, clings cold under every fingernail.
The Art of Despair
Good King Wenceslas rides
on the belly of Cerny's upside-down,
knackered horse, and though
he looks all set to land head first
on our beer tables, the chains
hold, the stirrups are good.
We sup in company of the daughters
and sons of the opulent world.
Each of us might pass
for a vampire now, styled to live
abroad in the day, tracking the latest
trends in fashion and culture,
taking more than our fair share
of sustenance, if not solace,
from all we consume, suspended
under spell of the art of despair.
The Troll
He has moved, you know, from lonely mountain cave,
quit the role of bungling, blustering dimwit
old-ferocious in a children's fairy-tale; he's broken free
of that growling incarnation of the obdurate
boulder in all its inertia, its thwarting weight – the stone
he would have turned into if struck by lightning.
You are the one left stamping your foot
since he's taken to the virtual air of the internet, stuck
a spanner in the merry-go-round of online
discourse, started speaking out both sides of his mouth.
Patrick Deeley lives in Dublin. He is a poet, memoirist, and children's writer. His seventh collection, The End of the World, recently appeared from Dedalus Press. He is the 2019 recipient of the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award.
