The Double Life of Catherine Street
By Dave Rock, in collaboration with Tracy Fahey
15th May 2011
You’ve scarce drawn first breath
In Catherine Street
When a wandering Irish woman
Pulls in a stool beside you and begins spinning dark gods
And errant pirates from the yarn
In her lap
This is us delivering fresh history
She tells me
We twelve are midwives
And waving her hand she frescoed
Silver echoes of eleven others;
Ghosts parading the brushed steel table
Our myths didn’t have enough meat
So we took to cooking brand new DNA
Took to reading books yet unwritten,
Took to fixing runes for the past,
Post-dated hieroglyphs and hymns
And finding ghosts of folks who’d never drawn breath
And we breathed life into them
The mirrors told us stories of the street
And the street kept shifting, slipping
So that you could never take
The same step twice;
Opening us to subtly altered
Echoes of itself and us within
-blink and the place is strange
You may as well breed your own ghosts
In such a place
Dress them with fresh meat
The butcher’s bride, the matriarch
Of Iressia, those Easter men
And women with eyes and tongues
Like killing tools,
Made masks from our faces
That clicked in like electrified souls;
In two steps you’d be another person entirely
If you don’t watch where you go
The woman’s words walked ghosts
Down my own spine, my own corpus callosum
As I struggled to make a hallway in ink
A midwife of echoes
And yet another street where all these myths can walk and breed
From these syllables of mirrors
Where she left me
This poem was commissioned through the Poetry Depot, the official SpiritStore/Inkstorm event for CAT DIG 2011
http://spiritstorelimerick.blogspot.com/
See the poem read at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWGQm37cZpU
In Catherine Street
When a wandering Irish woman
Pulls in a stool beside you and begins spinning dark gods
And errant pirates from the yarn
In her lap
This is us delivering fresh history
She tells me
We twelve are midwives
And waving her hand she frescoed
Silver echoes of eleven others;
Ghosts parading the brushed steel table
Our myths didn’t have enough meat
So we took to cooking brand new DNA
Took to reading books yet unwritten,
Took to fixing runes for the past,
Post-dated hieroglyphs and hymns
And finding ghosts of folks who’d never drawn breath
And we breathed life into them
The mirrors told us stories of the street
And the street kept shifting, slipping
So that you could never take
The same step twice;
Opening us to subtly altered
Echoes of itself and us within
-blink and the place is strange
You may as well breed your own ghosts
In such a place
Dress them with fresh meat
The butcher’s bride, the matriarch
Of Iressia, those Easter men
And women with eyes and tongues
Like killing tools,
Made masks from our faces
That clicked in like electrified souls;
In two steps you’d be another person entirely
If you don’t watch where you go
The woman’s words walked ghosts
Down my own spine, my own corpus callosum
As I struggled to make a hallway in ink
A midwife of echoes
And yet another street where all these myths can walk and breed
From these syllables of mirrors
Where she left me
This poem was commissioned through the Poetry Depot, the official SpiritStore/Inkstorm event for CAT DIG 2011
http://spiritstorelimerick.blogspot.com/
See the poem read at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWGQm37cZpU
