Poems by Paul Durcan
Three poems by Paul Durcan
THE HEAD TRANSPLANT
The doctor said to me: Your father needs a new head. So I said to the doctor: You can give him my head.
My days were numbered - broken marriage, cancer, False teeth, bad dreams- so "Yes" was his answer.
Now I lie in my bed wondering away in my head What will my father look like with his new head?
Will he look like a bull with the head of a daffodil
Or like a nonagenarian pontiff with the head of a harlot?
Or like a heavyweight weightlifter with the head of a fox Or like a withered, aged, tree with the sun in its branches?
My dreams and memories will percolate down his legs and arms; My ideas will seep down his spine like the roots of a tree.
And my eyes will swivel in obeisance to their new rotator.
His friends will say: "Quite remarkable the change in Old Harry -
His new head seems to be doing him the world of good.
Jolly lucky that blackguard son of his snuffed it when he did."
And I, when I'm dead, will walk alone in the graveyard, A ghost with no head, an authentic hobgoblin,
A truly real Irishman, a giolla gan ceann.
SUBURBAN LIFE AMONGST THE HIGHER PRIMATES
Having endured the screeching for a full ten minutes (At first I thought it was just somebody being murdered Or beaten-up)
I decided to forsake the bed and look out the window:
In broad daylight I saw that
It was my next-door neighbour, the Professor of Archaeology, Down in his asphalt garden screeching up at his son
In a monkey-puzzle tree:
"Desist - I say desist- come down out of that tree
And stop that monkey business" screeched the Professor. The boy complied by swinging down off a branch
And although the father aimed a roundhouse kick at him
The boy escaped into the house weeping "Mamma, Mamma". That night, as I rolled in my garden gate from the pub,
I observed, across the hedge from me, at a distance of about five feet The Professor in a monkey-suit and hehind him his wife
In a see-through evening-gown and a fur stole:
"Bon soir, fellow-primates" I greeted them:
But they did not greet me back: they never do.
THE RISE AND FALL OF MARY SILK
J.J. Silk was true Free State gentry;
Made his fortune by a judicious admixture Of fraud and piety in the 1920's;
By 1930 had settled in the town of Nenagh
As a prosperous, horse-riding, Catholic solicitor. In due course he wedded a smiling virgin
But he soon wiped the smile off her face. However, after seven years of nuptial torture, She gave birth to their only child and daughter Whom they christened Mary
(After Our Lord's Mother).
And Mary was the apple of her father's eye, Slim and small, half-girl, half-boy,
The veritable onion, the essential peach;
In her teens she rode out at her father's side When he was Master of the Nenagh Hunt, And he had her educated -
"Edge-y ew-cated" he would snarl in the golf clubhouse barrIn the best Catholic boarding-school in England
Followed by a year in Switzerland "improving herself." After her final law exam, she settled down
In her father's emporious office in Nenagh
Which, he had planned long ago, she'd inherit.
The other young blood in the office,
Liam Fant, showed her the ropes;
He, himself, was a fanatical nobody
Bent on scaling the social ladder
And, at last, after seven years
Of sitting beside Miss Silk in the office
One night he got her drunk on a bucket of babycham
And copulated with her on the back seat of his Vauxhall Viva.. The next thing that Daddy Silk knew
Was that the virgin Mary was no longer a virgin. Against his will, but at her ~other's behest, And to the vile Liam Fant 's gleeful delight,
Mary Silk was quickly married off to her vole-faced lover. Old Man Silk seethed with impotence
Beside the fireplace in the Victorian drawing-room, Bashing the brass fender with poker and tongs
But to no avail. Of to no avail
(Sing) To no avail, to no avail.
To no avail, to no avail.
The baby was not three months landed in Nenagh When its father started off on a stint of wife-beating To such an extent that Silk the Elder
Was left with no choice but to fire Fant
Thinking that Mary would stay with her father.
But daughters are stranger than fathers can say
And Mary chose to stay with her horific spouse
And live on the unearthly charity of God's sour milk:
Such was the Rise and Fall of Mary Silk.