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Tim Dooley

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After Neruda

Sometimes he’s tired of being a man.
The reflection he sees, in shopwindows
or the cinema screen, takes on a sad
substance, tired and withered: ash-stains
on a shiny piece of suitcloth.

The gents hairdressers, with its cocktail
of smells, stings him to tears.
He wants the sleep of wool or old stones,
to see nothing of enterprises or gardens,
nothing of merchandise, spectacles, lifts.

He’s tired of his feet, of toe-clippings,
of hair everywhere. Of his shadow.
He’s just tired of being a man.

In a dream he can frighten a lawyer
with a lily, pull out a green blade
to the astonishment of friends,
but he wakes like a root in a dark cellar
absorbing, thinking, counting the dead.

And Monday is the screech of a tyre
or a sudden petrol flare.
It sees him coming with his prison face,
sends him to hospitals where bones come out
of the windows, to damp and vinegary stores.

So he walks, for peace, for forgetfulness,
past caged birds the colour of sulphur, tripe,
dentures in a coffee pot, surgical appliances,
and old men’s underclothes hanging from a line,
weeping their slow, dirty tears.

Page(s) 59

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