Nava EtShalom
1

I woke up from marrying my father;
the window let in a little streetlamp shine.

None of us knew what time it was.
The streetlamp thought three. The boy

thought morning, and started to wake.
I laughed. We returned to sleep slowly,

mouth to ear, and the marriages continued.




2

I was writing a poem when a boy blew up
and my fingers stopped on "matching boots."

Nobody has company now; what's one
lost body that was warm in my bed,

quilting a night of bad weddings?




3

I try to stay in sleep
where there is at least my body.

My temporary teeth, his neat hands,
an argument, a draft.

Waking I say I must
have imagined the weddings.

These pageants, these men, these buildings—
they go brightly on without me.
from the book THE KNIVES WE NEED / Carnegie Mellon University Press
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Máire Mhac an tSaoi: Radical in  Life, Conservative in Aesthetic

"Scholarly, witty, energetic and a powerful woman, Máire Mhac an tSaoí’s radiant, almost mystical presence in Irish poetry will remain as a constant in my own life. She was not prolific; if anything she was reticent, but her reticence arose from a scrupulous scholarly imperative."

via THE IRISH TIMES
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"It's not misdirection for art's sake; it's misdirection as mimesis, the mind's if not the external world's, the shared world's. Or maybe it is, as Kelly would perhaps have insisted, the shared world's way, after all. That, and the poem's music, which is the world's music, that goes on and on, and in which we are invited—really, commanded—to participate, for a little while." 
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