City of the future
The branches of the trees are a squall of applause,
choiring out ragged notes on the park fence.
From the bench, shedding its paint in burnt petals,
I notice a trunk like a chipped dark vase, unpolished,
leaning off-balance, steadying itself with a thin elbow
on the iron perimeter gate that keeps the children
from the traffic.
Twisted with age, its face is curved with wisdom,
and I half expect it to curl
a twig in my direction.
Milky light breaks the cover of the upper branches,
daubing the lawns with a cage of brightness and shadow,
warming my skin with unsteady jets of heat,
heat that disperses unevenly out from the lawned
park,
heat that reaches beyond the traffic blockages, carried on
the same currents as the purest pollutants
speckling the arteries of circular motion,
the city’s cluttered corridors through which
we will walk.
The unstirred air is padded out with warmth,
worn as baggage, time’s stained clouds.
Unshadow – Wurzburg
A yellow tram folds itself around
the corner,
slippage and spark
are cobbled together at high pitch.
My shadow drains through the streets,
it seizes and strains,
brown eyes look
from behind the chains of rain
mingling
on the weathering shopfronts.
Steps lead to the bridge astride
an overwhelm of Spring river,
from where a sound that clouds out
the footfall of the passing and the past.
Where its white and grey mess
trespasses on disquiet.
High above the city,
your hand presses
on castellated walls.
Knuckles of stone, worn with story.
But there are gaps,
imagined looks and bursts of smile.
And there is that heartbeat
that recoils
from expressing too much, too late.
I try to unshadow it,
through the looks of others.
Aussteigen – Stuttgart
The doors of the train
snap shut like two bare
hands clapping against
a bitter cold, sending a shiver
through the bodies of those
that cluster on its plastic
seats.
Mice thread their way through
the brackets of steel below
on the tracks as
we race the escalators to
the bottom,
hit the platform –
too late,
but take
consolation in the
underground heat that
pads out
the tunnels.
We wait.
According to the colour-coded
map, we need the S3 to
Stadtmitte,
where we change to the S6,
it will take us all the way to
Weil der Stadt –
a mythic place,
the end of the line.
On the undercard of city life,
we wait for the gathering
vibrations of the next train,
the prickling tickle of its
tongue
beneath our feet –
the shared feeling that
something is coming.
Eóin Flannery is a writer based in Limerick, Ireland, where he is Associate Professor of English Literature at Mary Immaculate College. He has published 12 books of cultural criticism. His poetry has appeared in ‘The Galway Review’ and ‘Vita and the Woolf’, it is forthcoming in the ‘Hog River Press’ and in ‘Inkfish Magazine’. He is working on a collection of poems entitled, ‘Unshadow’.
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THE CITY KEY 