Sport 14: Autumn 1995
Vincent O'Sullivan
Vincent O'Sullivan
Primavera
Walk into a room when she’s there
but expecting no one, when the trees
at the broad window finger across the room,
she’s part of it, see, it’s spring
just beginning, sudden as all that,
and dozey and slow
as things are about October.
She sees you and she moves,
makes out she was waiting,
just for this,
realises a smile won’t do, that she has
to say something, that out there
has come inside.
And the look in her eyes,
as if this were something she never expected,
as though picking up a fax that’s about herself
but the print too small to quite make out.
She’s lovely she’s fresh she’s not quite with it.
She’ll do fine.
‘That’s about all I’d want
a poem to say,’ you hear her saying.
Not fussed either way.
Secular Thoughts
With her hands in frilled white
cuffs and her arms spread
to either side in a dark armchair
she relaxes the entire room,
the city, the morbidities of career
talk, while the fire
leaps on itself, the shaded
lamp brims its chaste corner,
the rims of glasses
floating their thin bangles.
She grows ‘lovelier and lovelier’
while nothing is said,
nor done, nor intended,
nor, mind you, quite out of the question.
Think of fishes and five loaves.