Icarus
LXIII.I
Icarus LXIII.I
MMXII
CONTENTS 4. Landing (After Marey) Laura Bryn Sisson
20. the interview: Harry Clifton
5. In the Sudden Charlotte Buckley
24. Girl Laura Bryn Sisson
6. A Far Room Charlotte Buckley
25. Trance Harry Clifton
7. A Letting Charlotte Buckley
27. Jigsaw Niall McCabe
8. Gefion in the Ploughland Charlotte Buckley
28. A Ballerina Niall McCabe
9. Icarus (6) Linnéa Haviland
29. Transfusion (2) Vanessa Lee
10. Invisible Petri Dish Aoibheann Schwartz
30. Antwerpen Luchtbal Jim Clarke
11. French Stove Aoibheann Schwartz
31. God of the Gaps Jim Clarke
12. Mammy Mary Sean Larney
32. The Pleasure-Garden David Lynch
14. Four Poems Síofra Dempsey
41. My Grandfather’s Treasure Chest Laura Healy
16. Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia Ciara Heneghan
44. A Folk Tale Maria Sukharnikova
17. The Pillar Sarah Mortell
49. Old Man Joe Andrew Clarke
18. Flight Laura Bryn Sisson
53. Sonnet Gaelen Mac Cába
19. Aloft Sophie Meehan
55-56. Acknowledgements
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Editorial The current issue of Icarus (LXIII.I) begins and ends in a spirit of creativity. Although the magazine has been in continuance for over 60 years, in a sense every Michaelmas Term marks a new beginning, a fresh flight of the vessel that Icarus has become for the artistic aspirations at work within the college community at any given time. Icarus has developed a strong reputation for student writing during its existence. The dimensions of the magazine are larger than ever. In recent years, its design has changed significantly and, thanks to the efforts of last year’s editor Conor Leahy, readers can now access a vast archive of past issues online. One of the essential challenges for incoming editors is to maintain Icarus’s core property as a testament to student creative writing, whilst continuing to breathe new life into the magazine. In selecting the written content of the magazine, we have endeavoured to identify and include pieces which incite creative reading, whether that be through formal, thematic, experimental, or other qualities. The illustrations that feature were selected from a mixture of submitted and commissioned works, and on a similar basis. This year, we have incorporated an interview section to Icarus. Introducing the series, for our first issue of the year, Ciaran O’Rourke speaks to Ireland Chair of Poetry, Harry Clifton. We are also delighted to publish his poem, ‘Trance’. We’re delighted to learn that some of the contributors to this issue are entering their first year in the college; equally so, that many are returning students but initiate contributors to the magazine; and we’re naturally encouraged in discovering that a scattering of revenant talent has found its way into these pages also. Although no editorial panel can ever escape the (often fruitful) temptations of personal preference, we hope that readers will find in each of the works featured here, as we ourselves found during the editing process, some aspect of composition or communication which seems to inspire, challenge, or linger in memory on departure. Editors: Nick Bland & Ciarán O’ Rourke Deputy Editor: Eoin Tierney icarus magazine 3
Landing (After Marey)
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Laura Bryn Sisson
In The Sudden
Charlotte Buckley
Some days I am pleased by the suddenness of it all, the light falls in the southern sky as ribbons might be held on a sigh like hieroglyphs,
the horizon as quiet as the sill of heaven and the girl who sits stock-still beneath the vision of the great oak like one of the four marvels
is part of all this and I know her well enough, however the light may fall.
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A Far Room
Charlotte Buckley
If you should go a viking in a foreign country and find yourself at a great distance from here,
should you be at a loss in a city where every face you see is me or almost me before they are not, or should an accident of weather remind you of the rain that is falling in another place besides where you are, then go back to that far room, years away from the others at the top of the house,
begin again in that room where it is autumn and already summer, much less the season
when you and I are together and need not attend to the small things, such as distance and inclement weather.
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A Letting
Charlotte Buckley
Let nothing dirty pass these lips for I am pure silk and while here and there a thread might be pulled,
this silken rubbing, this length of cloth knows no flaw
though you may try to find one with the run of a hand. Sloes do not stain my skin though I may go
into the wilds and let life wind off with the half of me.
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Gefion in the Ploughland
Riding, I settle the weight of four reins in my fist
the better to wrest the land from the sod of itself as you’d turn over the clean sheaf of a page
if only to enjoy the feeling of uprootedness
like the god who plowed away a country for one day and one night letting furrow turn
from furrow, and land draw westwards from land or the oxen that drove a river between two myths
and left me keeling in their wake on the wrong side of an island.
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Charlotte Buckley
Icarus (6)
LinnĂŠa Haviland
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Invisible Petri Dish
Aoibheann Schwartz
To lose your mind you must find it first see it, hold it lying in your hand. Something you can never touch --
a glimpse whose neck you want to wring.
Hoping it will capsize, and spill its liquid clear and thick as syrup. Dissolving, it allows the spoon’s hand to scoop away the flood, before it forms its ugly crystals. Crystals you watch forming on the retrieved item lost now lying in your hand. You scooped too late, you dropped the spoon. The crystals formed. The syrups oozed.
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French Stove
Aoibheann Schwartz
Place the match close to the gas, watch as blue flames flare up and pinch the fingers. Remember lighting it and flinching back as they whoosh, and gaze at little blue flickers as the match still burns, held in your hand.
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Mammy Mary
Sean Larney
Lights up on a homely space. MARY sits in an armchair stage left. Silence, 7 seconds. A door slams, offstage. BRIDA: Just me, Mammy! [Pause] Brida! I’ve brought you some lunch! How’s the stroke this fine day? Enter BRIDA. She is middle-aged, wearing a knitted hat, wrapped in a coat too big for her and laden with shopping bags.
BRIDA: Mammy! You’ve let yourself dribble all over your good cardigan. T’was a good oul cardigan so t’was. D’you remember when Helen from down Kilbarra direction gave you that good cardigan for your birthday this year gone? God rest her soul. The poor woman was dead three days later. I knew she never should’ve married that coloured fella. [Pause] Anyway, Mammy, you’ve taken me off the conversation. You’re after dribbling your way down your good cardigan like a dog that’s not eaten for a week. What am I ever going to do with you? [Pause]
I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, Mammy, but you can be sure that droolin’ isn’t proper etiquette for the likes of us, being ladies of the community as we are. What would Mrs Boland say, if she saw you in the state you are in now? I know what she’d say. She’d say: ‘The state of her! Would she ever get off her fat arse and do some good honest work? That’s what she’d say. [Pause] And then you’d say to me, Mammy, because I’d be upset, you’d say to me (if you could, of course) you’d say: ‘Brida, let her off with herself now! Different strokes for different folks.’ BRIDA collapses in a fit of laughter.
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Did you like that wan, Mammy? Ever since you’ve got your stroke I can’t help but be dropping the word into the conversation. Doctor McKiernan says I shouldn’t say it in front of you, but he has no sense of humour at all at all. The man is as dry as one of the corns on my poor feet. [Pause] Have you seen me corns lately, Mammy? I don’t think you’ve seen them for a while. They’ve gotten terrible bad this past fortnight. C’mere till I show you. She drags over a chair and sits next to MARY, taking off her shoes.
This one here now, I’ve had for nearly three months. ‘Tis quite sore, Mammy. [Pause] Doctor McKiernan gave me some ointment for them. I think I’ll put it on now. BRIDA goes over to the shopping bags and pulls out a tub of ointment. Looks around.
There isn’t an extra chair, Mammy, so I’m just going to put my foot up here while you put the ointment on.
BRIDA puts her foot on MARY’s lap and starts to apply the ointment to her feet. MARY groans. BRIDA: Is it talking to me you are, now? God knows I deserve this small favour after bringing you your feckin’ shopping! MARY turns her head away
Well, if that’s what you think, I’m off. And I’m taking half the shopping with me.
BRIDA puts on her shoes and collects everything in a fit of anger, except one bag of shopping. She leaves. Silence 5 seconds, BRIDA re-enters. BRIDA: And I’ve always hated that feckin’ cardigan! icarus magazine 13
Four poems
SĂofra Dempsey
My mind, caught in the beautiful storm (of wind-torn aspen-leaf thoughts Where sea and sky Collide in a roiling thunder) Into which my shaking hands Cast their net. ~ She exhaled seaspray from her lungs. Cracked lips, encrusted sand-hair, Skin salt-abraded, Raw, water-logged, torn. Waves crash inside her Breaking on her coral bones Gleaming fish Flit along her veins. Sunbeams drop lazily into the depths of her eyes.
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~ your soft and warm and sleepy mouth and your eyelashes resting on your freckles your hair swirled across my pillow and everything everywhere
belonged to you
the air the sun through the curtains the twisted sheets and my twisted breath
~ And sometimes
you’re still with me
The passing shadow of
the warmth of your skin An almost-melody just out of reach --
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Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia Ciara Heneghan Totem-poles stand majestically, scores of them. ‘Once used to celebrate native histories.’ Weather worn (once outdoors), like gravestones.
The raven, wolf, bear, whale, MAN. ‘It was believed that man came from the animals’ (I believe in the Father, the Almighty.) The surfaces of the carvings were repainted recently. Here, an example of hand crafted jewellery. White man’s coins, melted down. Red man’s symbols are deciphered on plaques And -- ‘replicas available in the gift shop.’
There, an Inuit parka (collected 1916) caribou skin. ‘Europeans had not reached so far north.’ (‘Europeans’ or ‘Americans’ yet? Never mind.) Ireland fought on. Saoirse! The masks fill case after case. Ceremonial gowns cover the walls with hide, ivory, bone and feather. Proof, that this was once life. The glass is polished daily. DO NOT TOUCH.
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The Pillar
Sarah Mortell
Well known to hold up more than one To presume is to ask more than your sum If that sum is hollow, easy to cloak Until it comes your time to choke And choke you will before it falls Oppression of such inevitable by all But when it does where can you hide Your fault, Your choice. Nothing left to bide. So many stand among us all. They grow to stand But stand to fall.
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Flight (After Anna Piunova)
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Laura Bryn Sisson
Aloft
Sophie Meehan
I wish that I lived with a man in a little apartment And that he would sit downstairs maybe making lunch Or watching his national team play Football or whatever And he would hear from upstairs the artillery Firing machine gun sounds of the typewriter he gave me And he would smile, Because he would know that I was working, And he’d think I was cute, And that I was a genius.
And then he would come upstairs, Leave the soup beside me, not say anything, just stroke the Back of my head like a cat While I waited And then go back downstairs And leave me in the morning, To open my eyes. And know that I was a long way from home.
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The Interview Writer, lecturer and current holder of the Chair of Irish Poetry Harry Clifton in conversation with Ciarán O’ Rourke.
COR: You’re now entering the final stage of your threeyear tenure as Chair of Irish Poetry. What are your thoughts on the current prospects for poetry publishers and publications in Ireland? From your perspective, has (or how has) the strained health of the nation’s ‘poetry business’ affected the vitality of the contemporary poetry scene?
HC: The arts have been set up as a saintly alternative to the incompetence and corruption of politics and the financial sector. But ‘Anglo-Irish banks’ exist in the Arts as well – small groups of well-connected people sitting around tables, issuing blank cheques to each other. There are lots of ironies, not least that in Patrick Kavanagh’s day the artist was an embarrassment to Irish society, and is now almost a fellow-traveller on trade missions, a little too closely aligned with the political agenda of his country. COR: Your own collection, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, has just been published to great acclaim. I’m interested as to how your two roles – the public one as Professor of Poetry and the private one as an active poet – may have complemented or conflicted with each other. HC: The Professorship came to me at the right time. I was young enough and angry enough for it not to be merely a lap of honour but a platform from which a modified idea of the Irish poetic tradition might be expressed – in my case, the belief that since the Nineteen Sixties (a moment of possibility and potential openness on both sides of the border, poetically as well as politically) we’ve lived a kind of regression in Irish poetry and been led, however brilliantly as in some Northern Irish work, up a spiritual cul-de-sac we are having to reverse out of now. icarus magazine 20
I’ve tried to aim over the heads of the invited cognoscenti at the lectures to the lonely young, those crucial one or two in any audience who will make a difference in their own, upcoming generation. You only have that platform for three years so it behoves you to put aside private concerns and risk ruffling a few feathers, being a bit of a public moralist – the ‘severe theologian’, as Kavanagh puts it, who lives inside each poet but probably doesn’t belong in the poems.
COR: You write in one of your poems of feeling momentarily ‘alive in the forest / of second nature’. I’m wondering if, for you as a poet, the act of making poetry might demand, as well as offer, something close to what those words describe. HC: Those lines come from a poem ‘Bare Arm’ where a man and woman in separate flats see each other naked in the small hours and some kind of instinctual nexus is established, for a moment, beyond the usual proprieties. A while back, I wrote another poem called ‘Trance’ about years of involvement with the wrong kind of importance before coming home To nearness, touch, the strength to feel, To the limited, to the real.
I suppose that ground of instinct or ‘second nature’ is something I’ve only let myself trust very gradually in the making of poems, after decades of overlaying it with ethical, philosophical, political and other more conscious excitements. I had, unfortunately, a very strong puritan superego to overcome before letting the ‘second nature’ that poetry is exfoliate inside me.
COR: While poetry has been the focus of much of your energy and attention over the years, you’ve also written in prose, your collection of short fiction Berkeley’s Telephone and your memoir/travelogue On the Spine of Italy both appearing at the turn of the millenium. For you as a writer of both, are there affinities between prose and poetry which may not obviously suggest themselves, or does each craft engage a distinct kind of creativity? icarus magazine 21
HC: I believe the two impulses are utterly different. If prose involves will and forebrain, a leaning forward in the chair, poetry, the dreaming mind, is a leaning back, a passivity and a waiting to be acted upon by the language. Or to put it differently, a prose writer acts on the language, a poet takes dictation. In my own case prose writing has been a joy, a relief, an escape – and a justification in the eyes of society, which likes to see a writer writing, producing pages, instead of a lazy dreamer knocking about the streets all day, which is how the other thing appears to the casual observer. In middle age, I suspect, most poets feel a need to stand outside themselves just once, objectify themselves, place themselves in the wider social context of the times they are living in. COR: Over the years you have found yourself living and working in different countries and environments, from post-civil war Nigeria in the late 1970s to Paris in the 1990s, and your creative work has reflected this. Do you consider yourself to be an ‘Irish’ writer, or do you have any objections to categorisations of this kind? How might your attitude to this question have affected the approach you have taken to fulfilling your role as Ireland Chair of Poetry?
HC: In answer to the first question, I believe that a poet as poet is a citizen of his or her language first and foremost. That language, in my case, is the English language, and Irishness (my citizenship of a nation) may or may not seep through as local coloration, reflex, idiom, but always secondarily. Ireland, when I was growing up, was very much externally imposed on the young as an identity to be slathered on, like green paint on the post-boxes, from the outside. As to the second question, I want the lectures to straddle the interface between ‘Ireland’ (where I grew up) and ‘Elsewhere’ (where I lived much of my adult life). I’m tired, at times, of the self-absorption of Irish life, where victimhood is indistinguishable from self-congratulation, as if nowhere else ever suffered or had a history that might, just might, impinge positively or interestingly on our own. Everything I’ve tried to do, at festivals, debates, in classroom sessions as well as the public lectures, is in the hope of letting a little air in from those wider dimensions. icarus magazine 22
COR: What link do you see between education and poetry that allows you to combine them as you have? Which, if either, have you found to be more important to you as a person, and why so?
HC: To put it simply, I think most poets teach to make a living. To speak for myself, the gregariousness of teaching is a necessary if irregular antidote to the loneliness of living in one’s own head. As you mention, I’d been out and about in the world for many years before Academe, and that may have been a kind of luck, in that I don’t now feel hemmed in by the seminar room. I just enjoy the connection with the young. You’ll remember, though: poets were banished from Plato’s ideal republic, while pedagogues were left to censor the dangerous stuff for the coming generations. That tension will always exist. COR: What drew you to writing as a life-project originally, and have your reasons for writing changed over time?
HC: In his poem ‘The Gift’ Brendan Kennelly writes ‘It was a gift, and I accepted it.’ For many years I would have rewritten that line as ‘It was a threat, and I evaded it.’ The moral self, of which I had an over-supply, wanted consequential actions, long prose books. Instead I got smaller and smaller, and hopefully a little realer.
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Girl
Laura Bryn Sisson
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Trance
Harry Clifton
1.
Somebody said ‘There’s a job going In Africa . . . ’ And the next thing I was on that plane. Which year? It doesn’t matter. You are here,
Said the map, and that was enough. I taught some classes, fell in love,
And saw a government collapse. Savannahs, storms, cross-country trips,
Alone, not lonely, in a Volks, Through a wilderness of withering stalks. The wide blue sky, the laterite belt – Everything seen and nothing felt. 2.
Somebody said ‘There are children dying In Asia . . . ’ And the next thing
I was on that plane. Don Muang – Americanised. Simon and Garfunkel sang
Through tannoy, at the shakedown points. The camps, the women rolling joints Are all I remember. Blazing food For jaded palates. The giving of blood Up-country, in a lying-down faint, And coming to, a secular saint
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With lives in my hands, long working hours, And a dreamy feeling of power. 3.
Everything happening in a trance – Adrenalin, auto-immune defence,
Fantastic overcompensation Roaming the earth, and saving nations, Touching down, in my own backyard, With a jolt, and a mocking word, A low from a Zen instructor’s wand, And slowly, slowly coming round
Through days and years, in patient rooms, To the self as home from home, To nearness, touch, the strength to feel, To the limited, to the real.
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Jigsaw (for Léon)
Niall McCabe
He asks me as we scatter the pieces all over the floor
what is poetry?
I look at him as the insect buzz of Mario’s pixelated engine races around the heaven of our imaginations and an image begins to form piece by piece among mushrooms, stars and magic clouds of a pirate ship sailing down a grown man’s arm Then the image of an angel flies into the room through the
open
windows
of his eyes we ask her for the answer but she just smiles and points to all the tiny pieces of our jigsaw lives which still lie all the
scattered over
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floor.
A Ballerina
Niall McCabe
You should have seen him wearing a kilt at 70 years old, ignoring the footpath margins on the side of the road.
I watched him face the wind with wilted cheeks, read the tea leafed autumn leaf-strewn streets, and the badly punctuated sentences of veins written on the inside of junkie’s arms. With a face scribbled with wrinkles he moved like a ballerina all over the tarmac page. Not half-bad for a man his age. I wish you had been there to see him raise his hyphenated eyes to meet the sunrise, and felt the heat of that big blazing eye of sun as it bled on him over the slashed throat of its horizon.
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Transfusion (2)
Vanessa Lee
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Antwerpen Luchtbal
Jim Clarke
What can be mined from this dead time, stuck between stations at Antwerpen Luchtbal?
Stalled like white noise in the sodium zone amid the greenblue dusk haze, pylons hang heavy with a web of wire, one shorting now, sparking on the builders’ rubble.
Under bridgework, graffiti whispers to the coming night. La Grande Europolis not far behind, the shadow of its curved concrete cliffs -- Avenue of the Law -fall first from heart of Empire across this brownland. Ahead, the North Sea, Port of Amsterdam, city state of sold sex, drug dreams, a half-sunken masterpiece, Imperial satellite.
And we, strung along a line between the two, a solitaire on an iron chain, sink into the greyblue glitter of Antwerpen Luchtbal, replete in dusk and cut short with fireworks from a sparking wire. A flash of brilliance, their stock in trade, these diamonds in the rough.
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God of the Gaps
Jim Clarke
I would spell where the god goes gambolling, laughing, moving some, leaving others cold; she strolls through the park, watching the old men heaving their pieces about. Someone must lose, but it’s not so black and white that anyone can win. Victory got deferred the day the quanta came shimmering, haunting all our utopias with spooky action from a distance.
If I showed where the god went, past the marketplace, I’d need to move there myself, disturb your observations, create uncertainty. Through the spun-spinning skein is what really matters. Beneath every huckster’s shell is the whole horizon, all of the nothing, energy transfigured. Within the gaps, god still lies immanent, immaculate, theory incarnate. But we are not really us, and this is not really here.
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The Pleasure-Garden
David Lynch
A large-headed stump-armed mammal gasps in the scumble of russet where a potato might have crouched. ‘And this,’ says Mrs. Dollarhyde to conclude the tour, if on an unfortunate note, ‘is my husband, Marty.’ Arise, Martinet Dollarhyde (the command thus knocking telepathically behind his eyeballs) and do wipe off those palms, such horror I refuse to associate with any flesh elective of my whim. So the hands go smearing. Blight-jelly all over the front of his apron he bears upward to the ladies the great corundum of his head, rough, ill-cut in the shoulders’ botched setting, bloodily aglow as with consciousness of a travestied proposal. The ladies must reel somewhat. One, in fact, is reminded of a terrible fish she once watched rise to meet her on the end of her father’s line. That was in Southendsplace, or noplace. Carrying too the grey-green hank a tinker might scalp from a faery-child. ‘Yes, hello. I suppose you’ve seen the house.’ He stands, hardly firmer than the fishing-line, nor as still. ‘A warmish June, though moist, muggy, that is, the cloud, sort of static, no wind you see.’ He seems to apologise for himself, dipping his head, and for Mrs. Dollarhyde’s fine occluding lithos, while the women smile and watch. And shelter awkwardly together in the lee of Mrs. Dollarhyde. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Dollarhyde,’ smiles Annie Taaffe, the elder, moving onto him. Dropsical carp sway knob-eyed in the pond. The tailless cat sheds three glistening ochre boules among the cabbages and, buoyant on its lightened rump, skips up and off. Clouds press. The awful thing happens. Annie Taaffe, the elder, smiles, says hello, extends her hand, simultaneously a signal from Mrs. Dollarhyde behind her, a silent warning that crumples her face like lemon juice to For God’s sake put down that thing put it down that bloody rotten leafy thing that stinks like I don’t know so that Martinet understands...that he’s still carrying what’s he’s lifted from the poisoned earth, and – spastic dervish at the core of his icarus magazine 32
flopping apron – begins to turn away to the wall...while at the same time he holds out to meet the old one’s handshake the potato-wreckage dripping from its stalk...encompassing also in the shudder of his rictus the other one, younger-looking, sisters surely – if inconsistently formed – not to mention his wife’s powdery piss-gorged visage still closing in a bitter pearl around its splinter of mortification as he lets fall on Annie Taaffe’s mules the dregs of a blighted Lady Rosetta and stumbles – with a cry of dismay! – to strike, palm-first, muck-daubing, groping a little, against her bosom, grinning at Miss Veronica, snarling at his beloved, twisting to the left, trying to step back on confounded feet and seeking only...the garden wall and the consuming, proliferating anonymity of pebble-dash, the lichen he might scrape, the crystals he might pick, one, two, three, a thousand, fingering the pockmarks, crumbling mortar beneath his thumb, dismantling patiently and ferociously as a scorned and banished child. ‘Marty!’ says Mrs. Dollarhyde. ‘Goodness,’ says Veronica Taaffe. It was an awful thing to happen. ‘Urngkh,’ Martinet tells the wall, and turns, but Annie...contrives laughter, chins pooling as her head strains down to look. Veronica begins delicately to remove the solid rubble, leaves, fragments of skin and stalk, necrotic, bruiseblue clots she seems unafraid to handle. Pinched, they seep like bugs, or berries. Mrs. Dollarhyde meanwhile looms against cumulus with the light like dishwater in her glasses. ‘What if we went back inside,’ she murmurs, ‘and left my husband to his fun?’ ‘Oh dear, no, it’s alright. This shirt is a poor old thing, anyway, I only wore it to protect from dust while we moved the furniture. Just as well I didn’t put on anything more glamorous for the neighbourhood rounds.’ (He hums sadly for Annie Taaffe’s tatters.) ‘At any rate I think perhaps we’ve all gone daffy with summer!’ She might have glanced up for a volley of swallows. ‘Yes,’ says Mrs. Dollarhyde. Still Martinet is wracked. ‘If not for these clumsy workboots, you know, silly things, my balance...I’ll pay, of course, for the dry-cleaning, or... or for a new blouse.’ icarus magazine 33
He tingles for the pumice of coin, which would scour from the drill of Annie’s cleavage what he could not leach from the potato beds. ‘Oh Mr. Dollarhyde.’ ‘Mrs. Taaffe, really –’ ‘Miss Taaffe. And “Annie”, please.’ ‘Ah.’ ‘Marty, do clear that mess off that flagstones –’ ‘I might, you know, repeat my apology, Miss...Annie. Miss’ ‘– before we have a broken leg to contend with as well.’ ‘Just “Annie”, Mr. Dollarhyde.’ ‘And to you...’ Martinet? Marty? Marty. ‘Where has that brush and pan got to?’ ‘...to you...“Martinet”. I suppose.’ ‘Martinet.’ ‘And I do apologise.’ ‘And I, too, Miss Taaffe.’ “‘Annie”, please, Mrs. Dollarhyde.’ ‘“Margaret”, please, Annie.’ ‘Margaret, then.’ ‘And Annie.’ ‘Yes. And Martinet.’ ‘Yes. Well... “Marty”.’ ‘Marty.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Wonderful!’ A silent insinuation among the ankles of the group: the cat, grey-eyed, brown and white, kneading for love or food. ‘Darling –’ ‘If, Annie, I had a blouse to fit –’ ‘A damp cloth is all, Margaret. Veronica seems to have picked off the worst of it.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Darling –’ ‘And you may call me “Veronica”,’ says Veronica Taaffe. ‘Well, look who it is!’ says Annie, bending to pet. ‘Darling, the cat has fouled the cabbages, see. Yesterday it was the lettuce. I’d fear for the potatoes next if not...’ ‘Don’t be vulgar, Marty.’ icarus magazine 34
‘If not for their prior ruination,’ says Veronica. ‘Well, yes.’ ‘Frou-frou! Psh-psh-psh, nice little happy pushkins.’ ‘Trudy’s a living creature, Marty, despite what you might prefer. She has to do her toilet somewhere.’ “‘Trudy”! What a nice name for the pushkins.’ ‘After my niece, who found her crying.’ ‘Cou-cou, pretty Trudy, the belle of the estate.’ ‘Plllrrrmmm, rrrlllmmm, prrrmmm,’ says Trudy. The ribbed hands comb. Martinet watches the combing hands, the spokework of bone that ribs the membranes of umbrellas. If he had the flesh of Annie Taaffe to stretch on driven stakes the earth might turn, dry, clean, its folds from the clouded heat, Phytophthora infestans glutted in the sweating grey. ‘She has no tail,’ says Veronica. Mrs. Dollarhyde tells about the lawnmower. ‘Dearie me, puss, this is no world for the meek and little.’ ‘Mrwrangnoo.’ ‘No it isn’t, puss.’ The thin bare fingers of the elder Taaffe shift and tease...opaque stones fixed in undead fur, and sinking.
Martinet among savours of lavender and wax, violets, patchouli, foreign blossoms and an old and distant mothball’s spoor. White, off-white, once-white grey, worn and unworn pinks and blues...His hands delve and he enjoys, paranthetically, an education: here are frills and tassles, thinned-out crotches, shapes of sweat, black bows he’s never seen before holding in their knots presumptive warmth and covered secret smells and one long coiled pubic hair, crooked and pale. Because Margaret, then, was blonde. His mother sighed and rattled, his father nodded yes, yes, you have come through. As her wheaten ringlets moved in the air that comes up honeyed by the south. ‘I heard the drawer,’ she says. ‘Are you looking for something?’ He closes it and searches the next, where blouses lie like white tiles, buttoned, collar-cut. Agog with the oracle of the private drawer he must learn again the configuration of a presented life. icarus magazine 35
‘Just a tie for tomorrow.’ He takes a blouse from the bottom and shifts its accompanying two to hide the gap. He places it in his own drawer, under a Gardener’s Digest, as she steps from the fleecy bower of the lavatory, cold-smelling, directly into bed, lest her form assert itself through crocheted lace. He prises open his half of the duvet and settles beside her. After reading something for a while she says, ‘Did you pick one?’ ‘Uh?’ ‘A tie?’ ‘Oh. No. None...suitable.’ ‘For what?’ ‘Nothing.’ She returns to her book, eyes skating as though the lines were ice. ‘I thought you might have decided to wear something respectable for tomorrow,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow?’ he says. ‘Think. Look at a calendar, if you have to, in the name of God.’ So Martinet thinks. Then grunts, clutching the sheet. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ And waits for her to start talking again: ‘You’ve driven Trudy into the arms of our new neighbours.’ ‘Who?’ ‘The Taaffe ladies. They’ve stolen her: I’ve hardly seen her since they moved in, aside from glimpses going in and out of their downstairs windows. You and all your shouting and kicking and cursing.’ He knows that she’s waiting for him to hate her. So: ‘If you could only have a porcelain cat, or a goldfish, or anything, anything at all, as long as it didn’t torment me with shits and bird-corpses where I try to make my garden.’ ‘Oh, your garden.’ Was the accusation in her thinned lips of his pedantry or his paucity of symbol? Martinet never knew, for as she turned her face to him he reached and switched out the light. (But Mr. Dollarhyde in the end did love his soiled, poxed mediium, as a nose falls syphilitically from the Panglossian lumettes.) icarus magazine 36
(And Mrs. Dollarhyde, walking its path, pressing in its soft baize the kidney-curved shape of her foot, could appreciate, as well as anyone among chrysanthemums, bellflowers, gladiolus, green pots of sage and cilantro, thyme in knitted scarves and perfumed rosemary, Anthos, blue-dabbed, sea’s dew, evoking spittle, hunger, remembered meals, lambs’ legs, roasts’ ghosts, its charm, this summer’s not-day, not-night, under sun and moon unranged. She touched a tomato vine, she ducked her head by an arch of runner beans and pea blossoms. Fish hopped, wasps hung. Bees shuttled the weft of pollen through petal-spun warp, blindly, or fastened to her hair, which she tossed. She walked the path. She tossed her hair. Cabbages and lettuces, broad leaves of rhubarb, thick beds big with spud. And, below her navel, a pillar of shit, perhaps, bracing her gut, or a zone built not of mass but absence...sustained on the sport and frolic of its own complex, self-tuned forces. She walked. She stumbled. She couldn’t find Trudy. She felt her stomach lurch and buckle, the vacuum eager. Stamens groped, pits of pistils dimmed, declining. Before she crumpled entirely towards her centre she released, like a kerchief from the condemned, a precipitate, a clot of stuff, not bloody but grey-green, black-oozing, half-formed and featureless and smelling darkly of the earth.) Annie Taaffe describes an ethical position on wastage, wantonness, material insouciance, of which Martinet, passing paperbacks and newspapers and magazines in bundled piles, approves. He supposes that all this is what they call ‘clutter’. He sits in her kitchen. She sets about making an economical round of tea and he watches, approvingly, a single bag circle weeping to exhaustion on a cracked enamel spoon. ‘There. That’s three strong mugs from one. What do you think?’ He nods out his approval. ‘I have some compost on the brew,’ she says, dropping the bag in what looks like a glass model of an upset stomach. ‘Everything organic that we produce goes in this jar. Or almost. Apple cores, vegetable peelings. I suppose I’ll spread it out back when I have enough. But you’re the expert on that. ‘Margaret,’ he gurgles through tea, ‘won’t allow it. She icarus magazine 37
thinks it’s repulsive, which probably it is. Compost done well before long just a haystack of worms and decay.’ ‘It’s only nature.’ ‘Mm. Exactly.’
She laughs and goes to open the window. The garden is a simple square of grass and plantain, selvedged on its nearest side by naked concrete and presenting, at the moment, as its only feature, Veronica Taaffe, thinly looking. Annie calls. Veronica wavers, a brackish oblong like a flaw in water, absorbing the shape of the brown-and-white bundle she carries so that she seems, approaching, to clasp herself, and murmur at her breasts. Martinet raises his hand. Coming through the door she releases Trudy and follows the cat to the chairs, each selecting the one beside the other and regarding Martinet across the mugs. ‘Hello, Veronica,’ he says, and then, because he could make a joke as well as anyone, ‘hello, Trudy.’ ‘Mrooom.’ ‘How are you, Mr. Dollarhyde?’ ‘Good. Good. And “Martinet”, please.’ ‘Not “Marty”?’ ‘I...yes.’ ‘Marty.’ She bows through steam and drinks. ‘Trudy has spurned my attentions,’ says the elder Taaffe, ‘and taken up with Veronica. You must hardly see her anymore, she spends so much time here. Do you miss her?’ Trudy dares him with split grey marbles and flickers her nose. ‘Oh, yes,’ he says. Something in Veronica’s look partakes of the cat’s. Veronica Taaffe collared with a jingle-bell. Veronica Taaffe retching hair. Veronica Taaffe straining crotchward naked with leg cocked and tongue pushed forth. The pinched pink accusatory eye. He grips his mug. ‘I hope Margaret is accepting of the situation.’ “‘Mrs. Dollarhyde”’, please, Veronica, for manners’ sake.’ ‘That’s all right,’ says Martinet. ‘My wife can handle a familiarity.’ ‘Of course.’ ‘We were talking about it only last night. The cat, that is. I don’t think Margaret minds. As long as she’s happy. The cat.’ icarus magazine 38
‘She’s very happy,’ says Veronica. The cat blinks once for yes. ‘How is Margaret? And where?’ Martinet looks at Annie, at her mouth, her neck, her hands, her ears, and beyond, to where the offal suppurates in the compost jar. ‘Margaret,’ he says. ‘Margaret is very well thank you.’ ‘She couldn’t make it out today?’ ‘Today is...a sort of day of vigil for Margaret. An anniversary to be observed.’ ‘Oh,’ says Annie. ‘A tragic one?’ Offal, cellular precipitate: the darkly smelling soil will fold it up, and unfurl nothing. ‘Yes, I suppose it is. In the usual way. Just after we married, you see, Margaret –’ Trudy. Another Trudy. Her bleak eyes warn. ‘...well. Never mind. That was before. In fact!’ He sets his mug down and takes his coat from the back of the chair. ‘Before I forget, here’s the real reason for my visit.’ He takes a crumpled package wrapped with string and greasepaper from a large inner pocket and hands it to Annie. ‘It’s a blouse. To replace the one that I, you know, wrecked for you. Just a plain one, really.’ He finds himself more concerned with what Veronica and the cat might be thinking, even as he leaks his smile on Annie. ‘Oh, Marty,’ she says, ‘honestly now.’ ‘It’s fine. Really it’s fine. I picked it up in one of those, those shops downtown. Of course I didn’t know your size, so I had to guess by sight, but hopefully...I’m afraid I managed to lose the receipt, so...’ She undoes the package and seems to hold it to the light. She passes it to Veronica. ‘I think it looks just fine. What do you think?’ ‘Just fine,’ says Veronica, passing it back. She comes around to Martinet’s side of the table and puts her on his shoulder. ‘Thank you, Marty. I feel I should if nothing more refund the price.’ ‘No need,’ he says. ‘I hope it fits.’ ‘I’ll go upstairs right now to try it.’ And she’s gone. Veronica Taaffe stares at him, but Trudy shuts her eyes, purring, licking her claws. He wonders why the claws that would open hairlines in skin at a ghost’s touch go blunt against the easing tongue, so taut and bristled. Veronica’s eyes icarus magazine 39
blunt themselves upon him. They are not eyes to part flesh and bone. ‘The strangest thing I ever saw,’ she says, ‘was an ant, in summer, carrying a wasp’s head through grass. A head, cleanly severed, so perfect and round it looked like a pebble till you bent to see better. It must have been the size at least of the ant’s whole body. The antennae quivered a little over ruts in the earth. Annie will want my opinion of the fit. It was very good of you. We’ll be down again shortly.’ He can hear them moving and speaking in the room overhead. The cat works her nub of tail. He leaves a minute go by for his erection to subside and sits down next to her, who lets him pet her awkwardly until a finger brushes a teat through fur and she turns, complaining softly. ‘Sorry, puss.’ ‘Mraw.’ ‘And for the tail, too. Sorry.’ ‘Mrwrm.’ ‘Come back to Margaret,’ he asks. ‘Please. I’ll leave you alone. She misses you.’ Trudy puffs through her nostrils. She looks at him. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’ ‘You have to be nice to me.’ ‘OK. I’m sorry. I promise. Daughter, daughter, come back.’ ‘I will,’ says Trudy, ‘I will.’ And wets her paw to clean behind her ears. So they sit together, breathing, a man and a cat in a room in a house, to wait, silently, without pain, for their stagger and decline from grace.
icarus magazine 40
My Grandfather’s Treasure Chest
Laura Healy
He closed his eyes and began to snore almost immediately. The grey hairs, like branches in a breeze, vibrated in his nostrils. Some distance further up the passage was his brain, his soul. It is hard to see it clearly though, like a planet with no sun but with the glow of a million moons. A mind in darkness. Shadows lurked here – long silver bodies with dusty faces and no names. There were a few dogs too, nipping at the shadow threads. There were houses, warm and cold. Some were in darkness and others had a buttery light inside. In the latter type of homesteads he sometimes heard voices. Crisp, sweet voices that melted in that buttery light. Voices, but no owner of those voices did he recognize. Passing out the shadow people, the shadow dogs, the houses and the voices, we close in on the back corner of his mind. There it is: in all its glory, covered in shiny cobwebs and dusty grey matter, lies a rock avoided by any artery, bypassed by all neurons, cut off from his soul: My Grandfather’s Treasure Chest. As sleep blankets him more, blood floats to the back of his head as it tilts from side to side on his blue pillowcase. The pillow appears grey in the light, like his hair, making his head seem perfectly sunken into its old feathers. The treasure chest comes to life, glimmers now. With each snore the chest is rattled, blood waves back in its ease, neurons light up in a midnight-blue hue. They electrocute the chest and the lid clicks open. ~ 1928. The countryside. Home. My grandfather’s golden hair curls into a face too pretty for a fiveyear-old boy. His dark eyes squint in the summer light, showcasing his long eyelashes on his baby-soft cheeks. His lips are pouted and he is about to cry. Mama and Papa are crying too looking at James’s body in that white box. He doesn’t understand why James isn’t moving, why James hasn’t been moving for days. They were playing in the river trying to catch tadpoles just a few days ago . . . icarus magazine 41
Sunlight scratched my grandfather’s wrinkle-etched face; his wiry silver hairs caught in the morning rays. He blinked at the day ahead, the treasure chest shut tight, and that familiar feeling of confusion filled his mind once more.
Time unknowingly and unaccountably passed for him. His stomach ached but he didn’t know why. The moon was rising, taking his seat to watch over the land. His head on the blue pillowcase, my grandfather wrung his arthritic fingers rhythmically over the bed sheets. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes. Looking close enough, you would see how they glistened as they did seven decades ago. The confusion was overwhelming, a drowning wave of unknown. But his mind shushed him now, as sleep drew near. Once again the treasure chest was unlocked, and my grandfather smiled in his dreams . . . ~ 1948. Church Hall. The Dance. My grandfather’s youthful pretty face had grown into a man’s so handsome now. His bones were strong and visible through his sallow face and his eyes darker and gleaming more than ever. He had on a smart white shirt with grey dress pants. His body filled the entire attire and he towered among his peers. With handfuls of dark hair on his head, he was the cause of giggles and whispers from many of the girls in the hall. But only one would take his heart and break all the other girl’s hearts by doing so.
My grandmother dared not stare at him for too long for fear of seeming consumed like her friends. She had her back to him when he approached and jumped when he whispered in her ear. She thought it was rude of him to ask for a dance in such a manner and just when she was about to tell him so, her heart wedged into her mouth, forcing her mute. They danced a polka, a jig and then an air. They hardly spoke but their smiles were enough. My grandmother’s pretty face was blushed now, her up-do hanging loosely around her face. My grandfather pushed her dark hair behind her ears, taking one of her earrings as he did so in case he didn’t see her again. She didn’t notice, her eyes closed in delight as she rested on him and moved with the bass of the band. They said goodbye and exchanged addresses, icarus magazine 42
unknowingly making history then, setting up their futures, indirectly bringing me to life . . . ~ My grandfather wakes once more, his head throbbing and his heart aching. He doesn’t know why there are tears in his eyes; he doesn’t know why he had been dreaming of a woman – a woman he doesn’t know. He breathed deeply, filling his chest and his empty heart. On his bedside table is my grandmother’s earring. He looks at it now and smiles. For a second I think he remembers. For a second I see his young handsome face, now covered in lines, the messages of his life. But the smile passes and he begins to cough. He sighs, looks out the window, and his face goes back to that vague look, the only one I know.
Like a broken record player his thoughts skip and jam. He is a man with no history and no voice. The treasure chest opens at night, his memories dance, undead. I know this because I know my grandfather has stories, memories, and a history. It’s my history too, stolen from me, locked in that dusty golden treasure chest . . .
icarus magazine 43
A Folk Tale
Maria Sukharnikova
It’s been 50 years since myself and my master started travelling the country, 55 years ago he was born under the path of a rainbow stretched across the high sky, and on that sunny day I cuddled him dearly. ‘What a handsome boy your master is!’ whispered the still ocean.
Taking me by the hand, a few moons later, he said: ‘I shall take care of you, mistress,’ and led me far away into a grove of tall spruces. Thus we left our dwelling on the peaceful seashore when he was no older than five: a small boy who never came home. All that his quick eye could embrace was our home, every fathom of cold ground was our softest bed, and every touch of a kind friend was the sweetest mother’s care. We washed our bodies in the lakes deeply hidden in the laps of land among mountains and drunk the morning dew at daybreak.
Once I, skulking behind a birch, saw my master healing a broken wing of the eagle that later, recovered, showed him the whole country from the clouds: how much we loved to talk to these solitary creatures, how swift we were riding on the backs of wild beasts; trees were our parents and the winds were our babes!
Another day, another year he was weary and angry, a weakened man, both in his mind and body, lost in the web of stony ranges thinking he could beat the very storm: he was climbing up the hill, step by step, losing his strength in dread agony: ‘Oh!’ exclaimed he, ‘if only I could be as tranquil, as strong as these rocks! Teach me how to be mighty like you and quiet like silence!’ Breathless, unmovable stones answered to his cry with silence, opened their souls to the young lad and purified his his own, filled it with the hollowness of peace: ‘My dear mistress,’ he was whispering, ‘can you see that lake at the distance moving its waves toward the shore? icarus magazine 44
My dear Life, can you hear their inmost murmur fading – ‘I have just let something which is bigger than myself into my heart,’ he continued and honeyed tears of happiness rolled down his face.
Some time elapsed, now he was a milk-seller in the town near the seashore where he was once born, still as handsome as a great oak, still alone. So I told him: ‘Find yourself a wife, do not be so lonely.’ He only smiled at me fondly: ‘I have never been lonely and never will because I love you, my tender Life.’ I never called him by a name but he was not Unnamed to those who met him: some told their tales about a Milk-seller, some heard of a Man from the woods, or a Passer-by, or a Boon Companion, others sheltered a traveller, an Old Man; no, no he thought he would have nothing, he would be a shadow depicted by the light of the Sun which every day rose new, he would be everything. I remember him wondering at people: ‘Poor are the ones who live so blindly, without gods, saints, great ladies and wise men. Rootless as they are, such people will always be afraid to lie in the earth they don’t belong to and leave life to go to their ancestors. I am all of them, I am with them if they could only turn their humble eyes on me.’ Today he is old and dying, he came back to the woods and now is lying on the floor of the forest, not being able to stir his feeble legs, unmovable as a stone he is smiling. Fierce rain is beating down on his body and he is happily answering in return: ‘I feel every single rain drop that has touched my limbs, Oh, benign endless moment . . . ’
We, myself and my meek master, shall dissolve in the moonlight so soon in Eternity: he is closing his eyes but never finding the beginning and the end of a moment in their circular rotation, whether he is seeing the darkness of his eyelids or the light of his memory and imagination, his spirit is calm and in peace. icarus magazine 45
You say Death is obscure, we shall show you how beautifully stars fall in the haze of the morning, in the gloom of night, you say Life is obscure, we shall warm your body with the twinkling rays of the Sun and lift you from your feet by the gusts of storms. Breathe us stilly, my taleteller, listen to the sound of the air.
icarus magazine 46
Old Man Joe
Andrew Clarke
Old man Joe had the tendency to separate all facets of life into two categories: those that he could tolerate and those that he could not. Although he was frequently vocal about components of the latter category, I could never quite tell into which group he had me appointed. Everybody in the town knew who Joe was to some degree, but anyone who had ever spoken to him could be certain of one thing: Joe hated rats. He hated them; it was all he spoke about. If someone mentioned the weather to him, he would mumble something about ‘bloody rats’ in response. But that was on the rare occasion that Joe was seen away from his house.
Old JoeĘźs house stood at the top of the dead-end hill on which I grew up, towering menacingly over us. Although it was grey and unstyled, there was something majestic in the way it lit up at night, pressed into the fringe of the forest looming behind. Joe seemed to leave the house only to buy white spirits which, his appearance would suggest, must have been his drink of choice. Every now and then he would be seen staggering up the hill with his bottle, pushing his hand against his knee to aid in his ascent. There was a rusted car that sat outside his house, gathering moss and certain fungi, leading us to question its usability; either way, he never used it, and I had never seen it away from that corner of his property. Joe lived alone. Though I had assumed he had been there forever, I later learned that he bought the house and moved to town a year or two before I was born: thus the town knew nothing of his life. Early attempts to assimilate him into society had failed. Cakes had been brought, gallons of tea offered over the years, but in vain. His inexorable grimace was a permanent fixture in the memories of everyone with whom I grew up. icarus magazine 47
The forest behind his house, though technically owned by Joe, was utterly untamed. There were no signposts or paths and the density of growth ensured a perpetual state of gloomy twilight was maintained throughout the day. The forest segued effortlessly into Joeʼs back garden; trees gave way to bushes, sloping ever closer to his house where the moss climbed the wall. Needless to say, this was a childʼs utopia. I didnʼt care that it was Joeʼs forest: it was my turf. I knew every inch of the disorderly wood, every rock and shadow. I spent every afternoon upon return from school exploring, climbing trees and building forts, and so I had laid claim to this small part of the world. However, it would often happen that after a weekʼs hard work, pushing around rocks and collecting branches to build my fort, I would return to find it dismantled and the materials scattered. Initially this didnʼt bother me, but eventually the persistent depreciation of my work took its toll and the fort-building business slowed down.
It was around this time that I began to realise how curious a character Joe was. I would hide behind trees and creep through the undergrowth, trying to catch a glimpse of him through the window; the sunlight always seemed to catch the pane at exactly the angle required to shine a glare in my eyes. But then sometimes Joe would come outside and drop a solitary plastic bottle into the bin, or meaninglessly sweep gravel on the ground with a yard brush that could have done with a haircut. I would always watch with an undefinable interest as he performed these simple tasks. I soon noticed that as Joe was taking care of these chores, he was constantly mumbling. It wasnʼt the humming of a melody but more of a rhythmic drone. Of course I had to try to hear what he was muttering, but every time I would move forward, just as I would be on the verge of deciphering exactly what he was saying about rats, he would see me. This would commence a torrent of abuse, and I would run away as the yard brush would be lifted above his head amidst strangled screams of ‘bloody loiterer!’. I donʼt know how she found out - if it was perhaps a a stab in the dark - but one day my mother just seemed to know icarus magazine 48
where I had been spending my afternoons. When I came in through the back door, she immediately expressed her distaste for me being anywhere close to Old Joe. ‘Heʼs a grimy old man’, she would say, ‘and you couldnʼt know what he gets up to.’ Or, ‘what would the girls think if they knew my son was associating with a drunken reprobate like Old Joe?’. This hyperbole did nothing but add to my ever-growing fascination with Joe. The more I watched him, the more certain I became that he was not what he seemed. I had seen the true invalids of the town, vegetating in front of a gratuitous television screen in a nursing home; and I knew that Joe was different. I canʼt tell exactly how I knew this, or what precisely the difference was, but there was something that penetrated the mindless tasks he performed, the meaningless mumbles, and gave him away as being some sort of fake, a consistent actor.
I only spoke with Old Joe once.
I had been walking through the forest on a wet day when I slipped on an errant rock, fell, and proceeded to slide down the hill right into Joeʼs back garden. My arm was grazed, my clothes were wet and it was suddenly very cold. Almost immediately the back door opened and, fearing the inevitable, I tried to pull myself to my feet to escape; but a surprisingly genteel, assertive voice told me to slow down and asked me how I was. Before I could move, Joe had come over to help me up, engulfed in the fumes of white spirits. He led me inside, offering his sympathies for my injury. I found myself sitting at his kitchen table, in a neat but somewhat stagnant room. Dust had become one with the surfaces, lending a stale must to the air. The dusk light came through the windows, almost orange, illuminating the floating dust particles so that I felt like I was in a glass dome which fills with fake snow when shaken. While I was examining the surroundings, Joe had tended to my grazed arm and appeared to be making tea. As I watched him pottering about with cups and saucers, I was amazed by how energised he seemed. His once crooked back was fixed painfully straight as he hopped from icarus magazine 49
cupboard to drawer with great speed. His pale eyes gleamed with vigorous life and the impregnable silence could be explained only by the lack of muttering. When he finally sat down opposite me with two mugs, he began speaking at once. ‘I have seen you in the forest here many times, young man’, he said. ‘What do you do up there?’ ‘I donʼt know’, I responded tentatively. ‘Just looking around, I guess.’ He laughed briefly, ‘Looking around! Ah, the joys of youth.’ He was unsure how to continue after this. ‘You live in that red-bricked house on the hill, donʼt you?’, he asked rhetorically. ‘How did you know that?’, I demurred but he just laughed again. After another silence I asked, ‘Youʼre not from around here, are you?’ At this, the calm smile on his face wavered momentarily. He looked out the window, as though trying to work out the answer to my question. ‘No, I came from far away’, he decided. ‘I used to travel around the world, meeting interesting people and visiting beautiful places, but all of that had to come to an end.’ ‘Why?’, I asked. The smile flickered across his face again and then disappeared altogether. ‘When Annabel died, I couldnʼt find the energy to continue doing that. The only thing left to do was to find a small house in a quiet town and wait. But I donʼt know why Iʼm saying this to a child!’ I didnʼt know who Annabel was or what he was waiting for so I didnʼt say anything. The clinking of spoons and slurping of tea permeated the room. Old Joe looked out the window again as the dusk light waned. From another room I could hear a scratching sound that I didnʼt quite recognise, first very gently, and then it got louder. When Joe finally heard it, an expression of absolute fury descended upon his face. He threw his chair back and stormed out of the room yelling, ‘bloody rats!’ There was a clatter in his wake, so I decided to follow to make sure he hadnʼt hurt himself icarus magazine 50
I dropped the blanket he had given me and walked out into the hall, where I saw many empty bottles of white spirits lying on the floor outside one of the doors. I could hear Joe moving about in the room behind this door, so I moved to open it. I was greeted by the most remarkable sight I have encountered to this day.
At first, I didnʼt know exactly what I was looking at.
The sheer volume of things in the room initially distracted me from looking in any single direction for long enough to observe that which lay before me. Hanging on every empty space, leaned against the wall, stacked on the floor and standing unfinished on easels were bursting sunsets, rivers, faces. On a table in the centre of the room was an arsenal of paintbrushes and a colour palette. Jovial faces smiled down from the walls, next to French meadows that were beside city streets. I was lost in this for so long that I almost didnʼt notice Joe in the corner. He had placed his hands on the wall and was stamping vigorously on something I couldnʼt see. As I moved about among the canvases, I could see he was crushing a disgustingly large rat. The heel of his worn brogue repeatedly came down on the twitching visceral heap until it connected with concrete. When finally it stopped moving, he noticed me and seemed embarrassed. ‘Sorry about that’, he murmured. ‘These damn rats eat anything. Theyʼve eaten their way through lots of my canvases now, thereʼs little I can do to stop them.’ The frazzled look had returned to him. He glanced around the room uncertainly before picking up the ratʼs carcass and walking out. When he returned, he had a bottle of white spirits and a scrubbing brush with which he set about removing the crimson stain left behind on the floor. I took this moment to explore in greater detail. It was then that I saw it; it was a small painting but had been assigned a central hanging on the wall. The ladyʼs face was captured in the throes of laughter, her every wrinkle visible but benign. She was unhindered by the onset of age. I found myself staring at this until the sound of scrubbing had ceased, and Joe appeared at my shoulder. ‘Ah, you like this one I see.’ He spoke clearly, but quietly. icarus magazine 51
Reaching up, he removed it from the wall and held it before him. ‘Who is it?’, I asked. ‘This is Annabel’, he responded in the same tone of voice. He gazed at it for quite some time before turning and handing it to me. ‘You keep this’, he said. ‘Itʼs yours. But you should go home now.’ Before I could understand what was happening, I had been led out the door and was standing at the top of the hill, clutching the canvas.
Now, many years later, as I sit in my living room, with Annabel laughing at the lightness of it all from her position above the mantelpiece - my mind frequently meanders through Joeʼs house, seeing those paintings again for the first time. I watch the last fifteen years of his life pass by predictably, where he had become something other than human, something that was bound by a body, a projection of a previous life serving only to remind us of what had once existed until, eventually, he was released into the ether.
icarus magazine 52
Sonnet
Gaelen Mac Cába
Go sound the gong. I rise, with sleep astrew My eyes, fit to declare the day begun. My sheets, my cotton sheets, reflect the sun’s Pale light, collecting colour, tones and hues. A watch marks time (the room in dappled blues And greens, tugs firmly, puts its denizens To work – the mirror, chair): stark digits stun The still-drunk mind, reason’s distorted view.
Could night but linger briefly, letting shade Cling ’round me, I’d return its grasp – I’d cling Fast, linking elbows, fingers, torsos, toes. I’d grip it tight, both arms, some silver glade Our mattress, splayed beneath stars now fading, Clutching time, hoarding our heat. But dawn grows
icarus magazine 53
Contributors Charlotte Buckley - charlotte.buckley88@hotmail.co.uk Charlotte Buckley was born in Kent, England in 1988. She currently lives inDublin where she is studying foran M.Phil in Creative Writing.
Andrew Clarke - clarkea8@tcd.ie Andrew comes from a small town called Castleblayney in Co Monaghan. He is a Senior Sophister student of mathematics. Jim Clarke - clarkeji@tcd.ie Jim Clarke is a former tabloid newspaper reporter, roulette croupier, playwright and whiskey barman. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in the School of English at TCD and keeping out of trouble.
Síofra Dempsey - sidempse@tcd.ie Síofra Dempsey is a literature fan who has been compelled to write as long as she can remember, from childhood endeavours to hastily-scribbled pieces written on the bus home. She is a twenty-year-old SF Irish and French student, reader, writer, talker, listener and general lover of words.
Linnéa Haviland Linnea is 22 years old, and from Sweden. She was a student of Maths and Philosophy in TCD and is currently studying Illustration and Animation at Kingston University in London. Laura Healy - lauraellenh@live.ie Laura is a Senior Freshman student studying Science.
Ciara Heneghan - heneghac@tcd.ie Ciara is a Senior Sophister student of English and Irish. She has published in both languages and divides her time between yoga and sitting in the Conradh. She lives getting emails. Vanessa Lee - leev@tcd.ie Vanessa Lee is a Senior Sophister student of English and Drama who enjoys bringing new ideas and poetry to life through paint, ink, drama, and text. icarus magazine 54
Sean Larney - larneys@tcd.ie Sean is a fourth-year student of English and Drama. He is writing his dissertation on Martin McDonagh, whose writing was the inspiration for his contribution. David Lynch - dlynch6@tcd.ie David is a Junior Sophister student studying English.
Gaelen MacCรกba - maccabag@tcd.ies Galen is an Irish composer studying Music at Trinity College Dublin. He has enjoyed writing poetry since his teens.
Niall McCabe - mccabenp@tcd.ie Niall McCabe is a Senior Freshman studying English and Drama and Theatre Studies.
Sophie Meehan Sophie Meehan is an SF student of English Literature and Spanish. As well as writing poems and stuff she makes theatre and really likes dogs. Sarah Mortell - mortells@tcd.ie JF BESS student and Vice-President of the University Philosophical society. Lives by the personal philosophy of big ideas and small victories. Aoibheann Schwartz - aoibheannschwartz@yahoo.com
Laura Bryn Sisson - laura.bryn.sisson@gmail.com Laura Bryn is a senior at Dartmouth College, majoring in English and minoring in Studio Art. She studied English at Trinity in the fall of 2011.
Maria Sukharnikova Maria is a Senior Freshmasn student of English Studies. Having studied political science in the past, she hopes to use her background in humanities to further her interest and studies in filmmaking. icarus magazine 55
Acknowledgements ~
Icarus is funded by a grant from the DU Publications Committee and is supported by the School of English.
Icarus is a fully participating member of the Press Council of Ireland. Serious complaints should be made to: The Editors, Icarus, House 6, Trinity College, Dublin 2. Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland. The editors wish to thank Harry Clifton, the DU Publications Committee, Brunswick Press, Conor Leahy, Aaron Devine, Laura Bryn Sisson, and LinnĂŠa Haviland. ~
icarus magazine 56
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