This breathing light is
full of past afternoons, curved as sails.
I try to find the Mountain Man album
I would listen to in the last house,
in the lamp’s honeying, in the shampoo smell
and closeness of a rose-patterned quilt.
Some things are a sun
the heavy months have slipped in front of:
the songs I alight on are more recent,
but I listen as a Saturday fades
in that chore-filled way.
A core: in between the swoop of voices
I can hear my hands smooth fabric,
make small predictions.
I still find it hard to tell
which shirts will hold damp longest,
gathered in their furthest corners.
In other words, idle things occur,
and occur to me: my father playing guitar
by the rough stone side of a daydream.
Being twelve, the stalled shape time takes on;
the plastic strings, varnish that peeled
away with a small noise sometimes,
left flywing shapes. The feeling
leaf-weightless and portable.
Alicia Byrne Keane is a poet and PhD student from Dublin. Alicia has a first class honours degree in English Literature and French from Trinity College Dublin and a MSt. in English Literature 1900-Present from Oxford University, and is currently finishing an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study that problematizes ‘vagueness’ and the ethics of translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at TCD. Alicia’s poetry has been published in The Moth, The Colorado Review, The Cardiff Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Banshee, Bayou, Entropy, Abridged, and the Honest Ulsterman, among others. Alicia’s poem ‘surface audience’ was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Prize; the short story ‘Snorkels’ was featured in Marrowbone Books’ anthology ‘The Globe and Scales.’ Alicia is in receipt of an Irish Arts Council Agility Award.
