Donal Mahoney- Three Poems

Father, Again, Peering

 

The final years dear Mother she

was never, well, what actors call “on location.”

Physically, of course, we found her

 

everywhere: 

the parlor reading,

the kitchen ironing,

 

the basement weeping,

unlike Father whom we never found

though he was always there. 

 

On Sundays when he went to Mass,

he’d stay behind, peering.

Like Queeg, he’d stare 

from under or behind

whatever he wasn't 

hiding in front of.

Father: Every Morning of His Life

 

The cup he took his tea from

all those years was Army surplus,

made of tin. It whirred

 

to the spoon he wound in it

15 times per lump of sugar.

We who slept in rooms just off

 

the kitchen rose like ghosts

to the winding of that spoon.

In my house, now, mornings

 

Sue’s the first downstairs. She

scalds the leaves and wonders:

Will the winding ever end?

A Father's Reverie

 

I have been sentenced to tumblers

of iced tea in an old lawn chair

for the summers that remain

in my life. But I don’t complain.

I go to bed and I lie there

 

for hours like a mummy.

I stare at the ceiling and finger a curl

in my sleeping wife’s hair.

How many hours do I slaughter

each evening, asking no one

why I quit drinking

the day I got married,

why I got married

the day I quit drinking.

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Donal Mahoney's father had a quirk or two

and Donal Mahoney's children would

probably say that he has a quirk

or three.