Olivia McCannon: Difficult Laughter
Taking A Turn
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.
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One stood up to tell the old gag
Of the dog with three legs that
Young girls never laugh at
Women raise brows at
A lad gives a snort at
.
Then an old fella sang in a fraying tone
Of telegraph wires twisting all the way back
Across time to his village the quarry the moors
A song that he said was as old as his legs
As old as the stone that stares out the hills
.
Then it fell to a boy with his fists in his pockets
Flushing and fierce to give them the tale
Of the battle was fought all on the High Sea
Where the ships were all holes but the men
Were all brave and laughed as they plunged
.
Then the tongue of a woman licked out of the dark
Feeling for low notes a song in a whisper
Into the ear of the baby not born not held
Not tickled and where is your father
Gone to the wars we must wait for a letter
.
Then came a pause where the fire had a say
On the log that spat and crackled and hissed
Too young too young then slumped into ash
And the coal that sulked and glowered until
What was hard was soft what moved was still
.
Then one stepped up whom no one had seen
Who offered no words whose eyes were a glass
That showed them scabs and bruises and souls
Their troubles their bowels their black bare feet
Who raised a hand and summoned a hush –
.
Some time later they showed up again
Finding each other in different rooms
With different hearts but the stories
They told were all the same or they
Knew the words and didn’t know why.
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To The Sky
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We’ve needed your blessings in our garden
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A wind came a bursting vessel over the hill
Miles high and across running the moon ragged
Hurling clouds lurching rooks smothering grass
.
The poplar stands quiver-rustling
The sap in her trunk has clogged
Her leaves are lumpy with a bronze canker
White mould has weakened her roots
.
The wind rams the drying sternum not quite done weeping
Rips through the riddles of branches all
The intricate winding of growing and feeling
Air comes rushing to catch the gasp –
.
The light tip at the top dives the trunk keels
Knows it’s out of anyone’s grasp and thuds
Upending the root as it claws after moisture
There’s dignity and indignity static swarms over
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Now the ancillary evidence of life drains away
Larvae coil and white-dash back into the dark
Finches flap and fluster from impossible spaces
Wasps knocked from bark feel cold flashing anger
.
Light flows away from leaves whose language was light
That sang unashamed of happiness always
Whenever the sun threw down some innocence
.
The last word is given to the rain
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Difficult Laughter
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Is what there is between a funeral and The Awful Truth
The bit where the dog….? Where Cary Grant….?
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They dredge up out of your guts, those bits
Something like a body hauled from the river in nets
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One that retches and sicks up mud, miraculously
Not drowned, though perch-coloured compared
.
To peach-eaters, one that feels gratitude as pain
As it warms again to ways unpractised in that place
.
A body that came back mouthing small bubbles but
Now extravagantly orders up so much air it sticks
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Then must kick the voice-box to get a track –
A barked cross between a climax and a hard cough
.
A body clinging to cold-wrapping river weeds
A family of limbs and organs that aren’t speaking
.
A body shaken by laughter, that defibrillator
Shocking them, for a second, back together.
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Olivia McCannon is based in Harlesden, London and Belleville, Paris. Her poetry collection Exactly My Own Length (Carcanet/Oxford Poets) and her translation of Balzac’s Old Man Goriot (Penguin Classics) were published in 2011.
