DENISE O'HAGAN - POEMS

Denise is an editor by trade. Born in Italy, she lived in the UK before emigrating to Australia. With a background in commercial book publishing, she set up her own imprint, Black Quill Press, in 2015 to help authors publish independently. She is Poetry Editor for Australia and New Zealand for The Blue Nib and her poetry is published in journals such as New Reader Magazine, Other Terrain Journal and Poetica Review.
 Website: https://denise-ohagan.com/

​The lady on the steps

​Even when I tried not to
I’d catch sight of her on Sunday morning
As, hand cupped in my father’s larger one,
We made our way down the narrow street
To the flower-stall on the edge of the piazza
And having seen her, I could not un-see her
So I twisted my head back for more
While he ferreted out his pocketed coins
For my mother’s bunch of roses:
‘Careful now,’ he’d always say,
‘Hold them by the newspaper, here.’

But more often than not
I’d grip those stems so tight,
My clammy palm imprinted, 
Because she’d be sitting there
In her chair outside the palazzo
At the top of a flight of ashen steps
Bolt upright, hands joined in silent supplication 
Formally clad, hair pinned and piled high
Haughty, not an ounce of self-pity on her
And her head just kept turning
And turning, back and forth
Forth and back
Back and
Forth.

I was intrigued, frightened
And intrigued by being frightened
I knew not to stare, but did anyway
As in answer to the question I didn’t ask,
‘Things happen,’ my father shrugged.

And in that moment
My childish world quivered and tilted
Its ballast of certainty loosened
And it veered off-course slightly,
Brushed by cool, adult intimations.

For my cousin in Faenza
​

The hollow of time
That hangs between Christmas and New Year
Found the four of us
Bound (was it really on a whim?)
For Faenza,
That city of arches, mist and gloom
And, of course, ceramics,
So startlingly and exquisitely colourful 
They hardly seemed to fit in at all.

Those days
Indistinct, hazy, blurring at the edges
Form part of the landscape of my mind
Its contours indistinguishable 
From my remembered version of it:
The muted beauty 
Of roads dotted by the tips of cypresses
Walks through Renaissance colonnades
And furtive late-night liquors 
Sipped while the city slumbered
And we fed on laughter and conversation.

How to understand
What we felt then?
Faenza,
(surely the city merits its own line)
Or Faventia, as the ancient Romans knew it
With its Etruscan, even Celtic origins,
Was elegant, contained and onomatopoeic.

You could not hurry in winter in Faenza
Time was slowed to a point of utter stillness
And transposed to this foggy alternative reality
We could, at last, breathe free.
I realise now, though I didn’t then,
That we were all escaping something
If only a certain disjointedness in our normalcy
A lack of pieces fitting snugly together
Even me, sensing as only the young can do
That primitive, universal lunge towards
Inhibition.

We were always going to return.
Our journey by train as nebulous as the fog itself,
Yet we were fortified, buttressed against what lay ahead
And something had, to a degree,
Shifted.

Published in The Blue Nib (Issue 37), 15 March 2019
https://thebluenib.com/article/denise-ohagan-new-poetry/

Destination nowhere
​

​We twisted and dipped and dipped again
The road cast over the land like a ribbon 
By turns slack over flats and taut over hills
Stretching and curving, rising and falling.
We chased it as children might a rainbow
In thrall to a never-ending journey
Our destination nowhere.

Squinting in the high sun of siesta hour
Against the dull hum of the engine
Lulling our thoughts, blunting our senses
But for a passing pity for the tiny bodies of insects
Smeared across the window screen, then blown off
By pure speed.

A village shrank in our rear-vision mirror
And its outlying shacks, abandoned long ago,
Lay scattered like crumbs on the hillside.
High above us, a monastery ate into sheer rockface,
Granite testimony to faith and structural engineering,
Stalling time and raising the big unanswerables,
Then falling away into the past as the fields filled in again
And swathes of dark-tipped wheat on slender stems
Spread in a single silken undulating carpet.

We didn’t talk; we didn’t need to.
Poppies cut a line of ketchup red
Across a field; olive trees curled into view
Squat, grey and hunched in on themselves
Gnarled forms of warning and reproof.

We chose to look away
Eschew the music, adjourn the aftermath
And cup the moment in our hands
For a brief eternity.

I hold it still. 

No room for tears
​

​His fingers moved swiftly
Folding, smoothing and folding again
Until every plane sat snug against the next
‘Fold flap down along centre crease’:
The dotted lines and arrows of instruction
Brought to textured, exuberant life
To the wonderment of patients around him.

But deep inside he carried 
The hard bullet of conviction
That this was no hobby.
He wasn’t just making boxes or flowers or birds
But smoothing out the creases of life
Pressing out the awkward bits
Filling each space with meaning
And pure targeted purpose
Shiny and inviolable. 

Climbing into the world
Of geometrical precision 
And cleanly calculated precepts
Absolved him from ambiguity
Dismissed damning doubt
And left no room for tears.

A gift for the taking
​

Hunched on the edge of her bed
Fingernail curling into the blanket 
She felt the slow wings of panic
Closing in around her
Beating her thoughts out of her 
Squeezing her breath thread-thin.

                                                    Life is a gift, my father said

She sat there
A husk of her former sixteen-year old self
So light she could blow away
It would be a relief, really.

                                                  It’s a gift I never asked for, I replied

But what would it be like
To not be?

                                                  No one asked, he responded

Hugging her thin t-shirt tighter
She frowned at the ink stain on her sleeve
And shivered on the edge
Of a perilous moment.

                                                       It’s still a gift for the taking.

So she clutched at his words
Mantra-like, embossing them
On the walls of her mind
Shielding herself
From herself
And from what lay outside.


Published in Poetica Review 2, Summer 2019
https://poeticareview.wixsite.com/mysite-1/poetica-review-2?fbclid=IwAR1pYtRIguLQ9-PNVw7YJlyZjR7yy_-IF2y9X-VmzW7E7xSb6q8NMu3Jqbo