Matt Bryden Poetry

– – – Two poems from Poetry Ireland – – –

Annunciation

Fra Angelico c.a. 1440 – 1442

Backed against the white plaster of her chamber –
she had not thought an angel could be so matriarchal.

Its crossed arms slot a key down her spine,
tie the cherry stem in her stomach.

It handles a brilliance that could burn,
its attention keeping a coolness to its heat.

Like in that hotel room in Greece, I felt it move
in me unknotting. The question

only of how long I could bear its attention
as the hand hovered over me, drawing it out.

How, also in Greece, the small children
filed down to the breakfast room unbidden,

queued single file by twos and threes
and, sat at tables they barely came up to,

drank the juice on their trays, unpicked
the wafer slices of cheese and meat.

Or the way this postulant steps
onto her prayer stool to launch her devotion

towards the vaulted ceiling, missal clutched
like a wound; all thresholds notional; regular rectangles

cut in stone, as much for exit as entrance.
There is no telling how the angel got in.

Issue 142

Fra Angelico – Annunciation (Cell 3), Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Lookout

Praia do Bordero

Cataplanas in silver dishes –
a terrace in the canopied shade,
the two of us, this place
an interval of white cloth
and breeze, the sea a stony field away.

Ambiguity hanging in the salt air.
Like two diners possessing precisely
the same likelihood of being
a couple, or father and daughter;
out there in the open.

Or a vinho verde the waiter opens, pours
and steps back from, complicit,
then collects the piled shells. Says,
‘I can see you are resting, let me know
when you’d like coffee.’

Even the crabs in their pots
fear the worst. They are through
with waiting – tired of banding
their own claws at depth
after three sharp tugs on the rope.

Issue 123