Oscail Do Bhéal

1.

My mother, by the orange snore
of the electric fireplace, is playing solitaire
on her iPad. She is always changing
the subject. If the Catholics don’t have time
for women, I don’t have time for the Catholics.
There is rain sizzling cold on the skylight
or squirrels, scarpering. Everyone’s taking a turn
for the worse, and she follows their declines
with compassion, with curiosity,
and with curious compassion. Her drink
is water with a faint sting of lemon.

2.

In our home she was the farthest from home.
For others her accent had a snag and a warp
entirely hidden from my brother and me.
Maybe the voice they heard was an umbrella,
bad luck to open indoors, bad luck because
the people who raise a shelter within a shelter
have traded too much for caution. She sets out
a ramekin’s worth of blueberries, humming
the carcass of a song picked clean by years
of remembering. I say I’ll say a Hail Mary
for you. She says Enough of the stage Irish.

3.

She didn’t forget the nuns of her childhood,
the Deo gratias, the saecula saeculorum,
but somewhere along the way she traded
religion for recycling, its weekly offices,
to separate the hard from the soft plastics
as one star differs from another star in glory.
Here, if anywhere, was the refutation
of use being our limit of involvement
in the world. The aseptic broth cartons,
their nacre-like inner foil, the bubble-lined
mailers, and discs of soiled cardboard cut
from boxes of takeaway. In the morning
they are like the grass that grows
to be mown and fragrant in the evening.

4.

And in the evenings she would help us
get ready for bed, saying oscail do bhéal
which meant (and still means) open your mouth.
And I opened my mouth, and she brushed
away with elbows and vigour, almost as if
she were cleaning a gutter. And later I lay
in the dark, scared to death and restlessness,
not by what couldn’t and was
but by what wasn’t and could.
And she would come and lie beside me
which, by simplifying, fortified—
a lull, a numbness, a lumen.
How I’m not quite sure. But it would seem
the point of lullabies,
to drop you off along the way
as they carry on to somewhere
else you cannot follow.