Aidan Mathews

For my mother

Lie down beside me As you had to once in a West of Ireland cottage The night the fetch from Newfoundland flipped the storm-window And the sea went mad at the sight of itself. Spray fled from it howling Like a naked file of reprisals being bullhorned into a quarry – The stencils of sock-elastic, the pinch-marks of tortoiseshell glasses! Water-rats wolfed a punnet of poison...