Smithereens Press Chapbooks The Sea Path by Ciarán O'Rourke | Page 35

The Home
(i)
None of the instruments will do,
the keys are obsolete, the keypads
packed for dispatch, the unplugged house ajar
and gusting with the gap of reading lamps,
spare radios, the jazz collection disarrayed,
your TV coiled and crouching on the floor,
its day- and night-lights out for good.
Nothing restores to its proper calm:
the sub-text of small dissemblings, electric
needs, gives way to base-noise, hush.
And yet your hands persist against the sound,
somehow carrying a fruit-bowl towards me,
as if the fruit might simmer to the rim,
evaporate as breath, or the rim itself
dissimulate, its stone-deep sureties
unsettling form, to vanish before your eyes.

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