David McLoghlin
The Room
It has taken years
to describe it: the drugged will
of the room
at the end of thought’s
corridor.
Books like Giovanni’s Room
he used to get me
to his room
barefoot, both of us carrying our shoes
past nameplates
Fr. Simon, Fr. Bonaventure,
Br. Michael, Fr. Kevin, Fr. Peter.
Ecclesiastical 8 o’clock
hush and lull in the enclosure, along the corridor
the rough hemp carpet
under our bare feet,
passing the red, unmoved Sacred Heart lights.
When we arrived
he opened the door
and I went inside. He said
explore the dark
as if it was the interior of your self.
I scrabbled the walls,
his voice in the dark.
The scrabbling was all inside.
I was not there.
(I am still scrabbling)
Then he turned on the light
and it was too bright.
Things since have been too bright
(only drinking dims it)
Then he said take off your clothes
and lie down.
I must have lain like a toilette.
Suddenly he was there in the doorway
in a kimono,
his skin so white
the belly straining past the profile
of the kimono
the way a sausage
strains against the skin;
on his legs the flesh discoloured,
male, but hairless;
purplish, mottled on the shins.
He wiped me
with a damp, lukewarm face cloth
face the sheet, as if
before a procedure.
There is a second
of snow and static
then it stitches
into us lying on the bed
talking like lovers,
as if--after.
It has taken years
to describe it: the drugged will
of the room
at the end of thought’s
corridor.
Books like Giovanni’s Room
he used to get me
to his room
barefoot, both of us carrying our shoes
past nameplates
Fr. Simon, Fr. Bonaventure,
Br. Michael, Fr. Kevin, Fr. Peter.
Ecclesiastical 8 o’clock
hush and lull in the enclosure, along the corridor
the rough hemp carpet
under our bare feet,
passing the red, unmoved Sacred Heart lights.
When we arrived
he opened the door
and I went inside. He said
explore the dark
as if it was the interior of your self.
I scrabbled the walls,
his voice in the dark.
The scrabbling was all inside.
I was not there.
(I am still scrabbling)
Then he turned on the light
and it was too bright.
Things since have been too bright
(only drinking dims it)
Then he said take off your clothes
and lie down.
I must have lain like a toilette.
Suddenly he was there in the doorway
in a kimono,
his skin so white
the belly straining past the profile
of the kimono
the way a sausage
strains against the skin;
on his legs the flesh discoloured,
male, but hairless;
purplish, mottled on the shins.
He wiped me
with a damp, lukewarm face cloth
face the sheet, as if
before a procedure.
There is a second
of snow and static
then it stitches
into us lying on the bed
talking like lovers,
as if--after.
After the Room
After we creeping along
the red corridor that was like
being inside a blood vessel
in the Sacred Heart
clotted with silence and hush
we stood in the reception area--
it was ventricled with arches
the stockinged, steady swish
of your surplice rushing behind me
ended now we were in sanctioned space.
You stood directly beneath the arch
that marked the enclosure
your feet just behind
an imaginary-though-real line.
I stood in profane space, coy
thinking myself Rimbaud.
Standing in the dark
your hood up, you smiled
at me
It has lasted. It takes
time to excavate
the smile’s register.
I thought it was friendly initiator
but now your smile is crocodile.
Then Father Mark came in
a side door.
We didn’t move, stayed
facing each other. His face said
what’s a student doing here
at 10 o’clock at night?
He wrote the syllabus
for Leaving Certificate History
--Modern Ireland: 1850–1950--
but cannot corroborate
because he is dead now.
As if scripted, we said
Hello, Father.
You were particularly mocking
then he was gone.
As I write this, I am gone.
You saw me—you didn’t really see
—out the side door
I called the postern gate.
Walking across to the school
to slip in for the last 10 minutes
of the Senior Film
—I stood beside Father Andrew,
he glanced at me as I slipped in--
I savoured the taste
of rebellion. The taste was new,
sticky—words now turn
their own stomach—white,
children’s glue
bonding my lips.
On the way back
to the school, I turned
and saw your face
in the doorway
before you closed it.
After we creeping along
the red corridor that was like
being inside a blood vessel
in the Sacred Heart
clotted with silence and hush
we stood in the reception area--
it was ventricled with arches
the stockinged, steady swish
of your surplice rushing behind me
ended now we were in sanctioned space.
You stood directly beneath the arch
that marked the enclosure
your feet just behind
an imaginary-though-real line.
I stood in profane space, coy
thinking myself Rimbaud.
Standing in the dark
your hood up, you smiled
at me
It has lasted. It takes
time to excavate
the smile’s register.
I thought it was friendly initiator
but now your smile is crocodile.
Then Father Mark came in
a side door.
We didn’t move, stayed
facing each other. His face said
what’s a student doing here
at 10 o’clock at night?
He wrote the syllabus
for Leaving Certificate History
--Modern Ireland: 1850–1950--
but cannot corroborate
because he is dead now.
As if scripted, we said
Hello, Father.
You were particularly mocking
then he was gone.
As I write this, I am gone.
You saw me—you didn’t really see
—out the side door
I called the postern gate.
Walking across to the school
to slip in for the last 10 minutes
of the Senior Film
—I stood beside Father Andrew,
he glanced at me as I slipped in--
I savoured the taste
of rebellion. The taste was new,
sticky—words now turn
their own stomach—white,
children’s glue
bonding my lips.
On the way back
to the school, I turned
and saw your face
in the doorway
before you closed it.
Three Person Sword
Books on the Japans
lined his room, including
the erotics of the Samurai.
“I love the loincloth. The way it bisects
the ass,” he said.
The Samurai
could cut you
clean in half, from right
carotid to left
hip
you were peasant,
perceived to not have bowed
low enough to the daimyō
then one of them stepped
forward.
The poise, stillness lake-mind
necessary to make that cut
—like the flow of a brush
once put to paper,
a decision that must be lived with
from beginning to end--
nodded at by those watching:
the beauty of terror
then they left
to feast on roe and sea urchins,
clean in their robes
after floating in the steam
with the lotus,
left your family to collect
your trunk:
headless, still kneeling.
A sword hummed in him
like rimmed glasses
rubbed to a screeching.
Those old swords still hang
dappled by canted sunlight
in museums in Dublin.
You cannot see
their victims, smelted
between layers of enfolded
steel, until it is tensile
enough to cut through
two or three condemned prisoners:
tie them down and sever them
or stand them up to cut them.
(I know what it is
to be a body.
You are piled
among the others:
sandwiched.
It is happening.)
Though it is tallied
on the blade in fluid
precise characters
just how many it cut through,
although you were one of them
you were not important.
You walk forward two steps--
twenty years before you fall apart.
When I was fifteen, I said to my teacher,
“I’m curious about what it’s like
to kiss a man.” He was a priest--
he was a Benedictine. He said,
“you can kiss me
if you like.”
Books on the Japans
lined his room, including
the erotics of the Samurai.
“I love the loincloth. The way it bisects
the ass,” he said.
The Samurai
could cut you
clean in half, from right
carotid to left
hip
you were peasant,
perceived to not have bowed
low enough to the daimyō
then one of them stepped
forward.
The poise, stillness lake-mind
necessary to make that cut
—like the flow of a brush
once put to paper,
a decision that must be lived with
from beginning to end--
nodded at by those watching:
the beauty of terror
then they left
to feast on roe and sea urchins,
clean in their robes
after floating in the steam
with the lotus,
left your family to collect
your trunk:
headless, still kneeling.
A sword hummed in him
like rimmed glasses
rubbed to a screeching.
Those old swords still hang
dappled by canted sunlight
in museums in Dublin.
You cannot see
their victims, smelted
between layers of enfolded
steel, until it is tensile
enough to cut through
two or three condemned prisoners:
tie them down and sever them
or stand them up to cut them.
(I know what it is
to be a body.
You are piled
among the others:
sandwiched.
It is happening.)
Though it is tallied
on the blade in fluid
precise characters
just how many it cut through,
although you were one of them
you were not important.
You walk forward two steps--
twenty years before you fall apart.
When I was fifteen, I said to my teacher,
“I’m curious about what it’s like
to kiss a man.” He was a priest--
he was a Benedictine. He said,
“you can kiss me
if you like.”
Taking Everything
The writing teacher says:
“we believe it. But
what is an image for
taking everything?”
It would be his eyes
glazed, up close, a quarter
of a second before he kissed
me, lips shucking over oyster shell
—though my shell was soft—slurping me
down and in—it would be his eyes
almost crazed for an intelligent man
who had studied theology and come up
in the world from the Falls Road
during Internment
to be among the Benedictines
where he pulled the hairs
around my nipples
—no hair on my chinny-chin-chin--
an eager tugging
almost a ripping, his lips billowing--
not a sigh, but an impulse out,
an imposition. If you did this, you would ask
hesitant permission. “Baby, will we act a
“rape fantasy”? You wouldn’t do this
to your pupil
they were so dilated, not seeing me. I contracted,
and froze: ice to be shaved
absorbed, and then disappear. He was always sober,
though his face and eyes were glazed with a layer
of something like lamb fat, his lips chewing as if eating
—but not seeing me—like someone at a feast
who isn’t hungry, an addict. Binge
the table.
That someone might plunder
and ravish: the swan, and quail,
and their quail eggs, the whole Tudor
beauty of it—it does
not know it is beautiful--
with full faculties, measured,
eating, on and on, is almost understandable,
but to be unconscious
and not see?
I was liquid,
to be added to his.
That was what I was for.
Not even metaphor.
This is the birth of the static
in me now.
I leap between the channels.
When you finish reading
you can change the transmission
but he stays broadcasting in me
at least a day
until the receptor goes silent.
He is still active, somewhere.
The writing teacher says:
“we believe it. But
what is an image for
taking everything?”
It would be his eyes
glazed, up close, a quarter
of a second before he kissed
me, lips shucking over oyster shell
—though my shell was soft—slurping me
down and in—it would be his eyes
almost crazed for an intelligent man
who had studied theology and come up
in the world from the Falls Road
during Internment
to be among the Benedictines
where he pulled the hairs
around my nipples
—no hair on my chinny-chin-chin--
an eager tugging
almost a ripping, his lips billowing--
not a sigh, but an impulse out,
an imposition. If you did this, you would ask
hesitant permission. “Baby, will we act a
“rape fantasy”? You wouldn’t do this
to your pupil
they were so dilated, not seeing me. I contracted,
and froze: ice to be shaved
absorbed, and then disappear. He was always sober,
though his face and eyes were glazed with a layer
of something like lamb fat, his lips chewing as if eating
—but not seeing me—like someone at a feast
who isn’t hungry, an addict. Binge
the table.
That someone might plunder
and ravish: the swan, and quail,
and their quail eggs, the whole Tudor
beauty of it—it does
not know it is beautiful--
with full faculties, measured,
eating, on and on, is almost understandable,
but to be unconscious
and not see?
I was liquid,
to be added to his.
That was what I was for.
Not even metaphor.
This is the birth of the static
in me now.
I leap between the channels.
When you finish reading
you can change the transmission
but he stays broadcasting in me
at least a day
until the receptor goes silent.
He is still active, somewhere.
Stockholm Syndrome
“Niall Noígíallach: noí, nine; gíall,
a human pledge or hostage;
the possessive suffix –ach”.
(Dictionary of the Irish Language, Compact Edition.)
A man on the subway in shorts
and ankle socks
that hug below the bone
—the pure white fringe--
brings you back,
brings back visiting you in Belfast
after the operation. A nick in the shower
and your little toe had gone black.
Diabetic, you were strangely careless
though you were careful
in every other way.
You wrote Thank You cards
the morning after the party. Your handwriting
never left the line.
Reeling in, you were never careless with me
—a gel novacained the hook.
No one could smell your sweat on me.
With others you wore manners
like a translucent membrane.
You stole food as I prepared it
once, visiting me a day
when I was wrapped
in a long thesis without headway
—Barry’s rental, The Old School House
two miles from the Cliffs of Moher.
You gobbled half the chorizo
meant for the meal.
When I told you stop it, you danced
the antic magpie, mocking
stop it, stop! and would not stop it
the beak tip starting to poke.
After lunch, you napped, regal.
I sat on the front step, fuzzy,
an unhoused nervous system
looking down on Lehinch,
Liscannor Bay, the mapping
of early summer.
After an hour, your apology:
a touch on my shoulder
(—inserted a line, whisper
of a pump,
parasite proboscis
piping away blood).
Post-op in Belfast, you lay fatly on the couch
in your track suit bottoms
and white ankle socks.
I said, “I’d like to see it.”
Thrilled, you said, “I love how you’re fascinated
by wounds.”
You peeled back the dressing.
I remember nothing
about the stump.
Poor Tom Thumb
—not there at all.
I do remember.
—Like meat, a marbling:
a congealed gel-surfacing.
None of it visible once you put on
the sock. We stayed in
the whole weekend. Your sister
waiting on us hand and foot.
I didn’t go out to see Belfast.
I was safe in your house. It was
pleasant, your suburbs ringing
around me.
*
I am thinking of West Clare,
quick cloud shadows on pasture
May sun on clean hay-gold,
and me, separate from sunlight,
from Ireland
from history.
You are
--say him--
Terence Hartley,
defrocked
from the Order of Saint Benedict.
You controlled the postern gate.
How many of us there were
is a stair into darkness.
Niall of the Nine Hostages
was from Ulster. People
boast they are of his lineage.
Only the raptor is recorded.
We don’t know their names.
I see them in the shadows
under my eyes.
I see my school friends.
Some of them were hostaged too.
I don’t know who.
“Niall Noígíallach: noí, nine; gíall,
a human pledge or hostage;
the possessive suffix –ach”.
(Dictionary of the Irish Language, Compact Edition.)
A man on the subway in shorts
and ankle socks
that hug below the bone
—the pure white fringe--
brings you back,
brings back visiting you in Belfast
after the operation. A nick in the shower
and your little toe had gone black.
Diabetic, you were strangely careless
though you were careful
in every other way.
You wrote Thank You cards
the morning after the party. Your handwriting
never left the line.
Reeling in, you were never careless with me
—a gel novacained the hook.
No one could smell your sweat on me.
With others you wore manners
like a translucent membrane.
You stole food as I prepared it
once, visiting me a day
when I was wrapped
in a long thesis without headway
—Barry’s rental, The Old School House
two miles from the Cliffs of Moher.
You gobbled half the chorizo
meant for the meal.
When I told you stop it, you danced
the antic magpie, mocking
stop it, stop! and would not stop it
the beak tip starting to poke.
After lunch, you napped, regal.
I sat on the front step, fuzzy,
an unhoused nervous system
looking down on Lehinch,
Liscannor Bay, the mapping
of early summer.
After an hour, your apology:
a touch on my shoulder
(—inserted a line, whisper
of a pump,
parasite proboscis
piping away blood).
Post-op in Belfast, you lay fatly on the couch
in your track suit bottoms
and white ankle socks.
I said, “I’d like to see it.”
Thrilled, you said, “I love how you’re fascinated
by wounds.”
You peeled back the dressing.
I remember nothing
about the stump.
Poor Tom Thumb
—not there at all.
I do remember.
—Like meat, a marbling:
a congealed gel-surfacing.
None of it visible once you put on
the sock. We stayed in
the whole weekend. Your sister
waiting on us hand and foot.
I didn’t go out to see Belfast.
I was safe in your house. It was
pleasant, your suburbs ringing
around me.
*
I am thinking of West Clare,
quick cloud shadows on pasture
May sun on clean hay-gold,
and me, separate from sunlight,
from Ireland
from history.
You are
--say him--
Terence Hartley,
defrocked
from the Order of Saint Benedict.
You controlled the postern gate.
How many of us there were
is a stair into darkness.
Niall of the Nine Hostages
was from Ulster. People
boast they are of his lineage.
Only the raptor is recorded.
We don’t know their names.
I see them in the shadows
under my eyes.
I see my school friends.
Some of them were hostaged too.
I don’t know who.
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David McLoghlin is a poet, literary translator and memoirist from Dublin, Ireland, who has lived in New York City since 2010. His first collection is Waiting for Saint Brendan and Other Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2012). Sign Tongue won the inaugural 2014 Goodmorning Menagerie Chapbook-in-Translation prize for his rendering of Chilean poet Enrique Winter's work into English. His second collection, Santiago Sketches, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2017. His work has been broadcast on WNYC's Radiolab, and performed on film by Dominic West. A Pushcart nominee, he has received awards, grants and fellowships from NYU, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Ireland’s Arts Council and The Patrick Kavanagh Awards. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in journals like Poetry Ireland Review, The Moth magazine, The Stinging Fly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Poetry International, Asymptote, and anthologized in Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). With his wife Adrienne Brock, he is co-organizer of The Eagle and the Wren Reading Series at BookCourt in Brooklyn.
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