Two Poems: Highlights; Weekend AwayAuthor(s): Justin QuinnSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 22 (Summer, 1998), pp. 98-100Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735894 .

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Twp^efl?s

JUSTIN QUINN

HIGHLIGHTS

Last night the couple in the flat above us

Were in full flight: tirades and injured feelings Swung back and forth for hours across the ceiling Like bad jazz solos, long and repetitious. Last week we caught crescendos from Sibelius.

And now tonight around eleven stealing

Through carpets and concrete slabs a wild, freewheeling Moan of utter joy, which is their Anschluss.

But otherwise we'd never know they're there

And easily forget their sixth-floor sitcom.

We get on with our own lives ?

work and leisure,

Chores tending to our household appliances ?

Which seem the same as theirs, that is, apart from

What happens between the highlights, in silence.

98 QUINN Two Poems', Irish Review 22 (1998)

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WEEKEND AWAY

This long weekend we're here in an apartment

Right in the centre, off St Stephen's Green,

Ten minutes walk from everything to clubs,

Museums, buskers, chain-stores, cinemas

And bars.The place was offered us by friends

Off west to Galway, to leave it all behind,

Their all to serve us as a hide-away.

Mornings have the seagulls wailing torment

Through empty weekend skies; they swoop, so keen

To see deep shoals. Their arcs have chirnney-hubs. A mile below them, awake and in amaze,

We have put to sea, are lifted high on fronds

Of waves, smashed downward, are lastly brined

And washed up on the bed beneath the duvet.

Beside us stands the Irish Permanent

Head office holding hordes behind a sheen

Of metal, glass and Brobdingnagian Chubbs ?

The hoards of those who have, who can amass

Enough to build a home. But no ground-rents Are paid at night by the hundreds that we find

Stretched out on pavements for a cider soir?e.

A landscape on the wall to ornament

The living room. A Connemara scene

Of boreen, field and pole. Some fuchsia shrubs.

Black hills. Dark twilight. But something s gone amiss -

The twilight spreads beyond the frame, the fence,

Into the room and out beyond the blinds

Across the Dublin sky, across to Galway.

We hover in our spaceship, self-important, Two floors above the brawls and shouts that mean

The bars have shut: Up Ireland! Up the Dubs!

Which fade towards two. We are anonymous,

Untouchable, looking on the street that wends

To Leeson's. Not a mugger stirs. And mind,

If he did, we'd lift off for the Milky Way.

QUINN Two Poems', Irish Review 22 (1998) 99

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With coffee and a bar of peppermint You stretch out with your novel, the TV screen

Abandoned for Heathcliff running through the scrubs Across the moors, his raging animus.

Another world inside these walls, which ends

And you drift all the long way back. Now bind Your arms round me, your more real moorings, OK?

A different strand of hair is like a portent, Licked round the inside of an otherwise clean

White oven dish (another in the tub's

Small plughole grille), a sign perhaps that someone's

Life, somebody else's life, will cleanse

This whole apartment space of us, in kind.

We buy a paper for each numbered day.

100 QUINN 'Two Poems', Irish Review 22 (1998)

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