Eamer O'Keeffe
Hungry House
Old Joseph hovers behind the cliff,
to slice a blade through the bay windows.
Upstairs is bent with a relic of penance;
the hall drinks redcurrant fingers.
He fixes clocks on the darkening sky;
slipping through the final decade.
Bramble thickets tickle the timbers;
mice are laid on lilac paper.
Rats clamber from dank corners;
a Virgin covers the top floor.
The kitchen swallows blackened joists.
A sea of green is eaten by toads.
Hungry statues walk on the lawn,
bolted and crumbled with every foot.
Upstairs windows are buried by hand.
The house looks out of dark roots.
From rose-boards in the railway yard,
the basement tangles twisted gears
with cobwebs crocheted in aluminium.
Christ is blooded for a hundred years.
Inhabitants blinkered to red threads,
yellow fungus and grey milt,
the house edges with crimpled anger.
It is no such thing for me to wake it.
The attic ghosts impossible chords,
folded pain makes silver trails.
Dismantled lights smash the toppling
barricades against mutation.
The drawing room hoists a monument,
clogging the roof with rusty nails.
Grandfather watches the pampas grass.
Dusty music falls out of the stairs.
Through the scaffold, moored in oak,
the hallway rocks to the front door.
In emerald moss and galloping rot,
the shifting cellar unravels the floor.
To rescue a ruin, silence walks
through the chaos. Shuttered shelves
disintegrate in the gun room.
St. Joseph glides over the fence.
Page(s) 145-146
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