Bolger, "Little Xs"

Unexpectedly this October afternoon, the telescope turns,
I see myself, made small again, through its objective lens:

I am not the widower, who recently buried my wife,
Nor the dutiful son who kept vigil while my father,
Like a punch-drunk boxer, fought to out-fox death,

Demented and enraged, hands trapped in cartoon gloves
To stop him pulling out the tube to his morphine pump.

Today we clear the house where he lived for sixty years.
In the bedroom where I was born, my siblings recall

How, as children, their only clue to my birth occurring
Behind this closed door were anxious instructions to pray.

When we open up the attic we discover the suitcase
My mother packed for her last trip into hospital:

A wash-bag and talc, clothes she never got to wear home,
A purse crammed with prayers and the folded letter
I wrote, as a ten-year-old, for my sister to bring into her.

I spend one page telling her how good I'm being, then cram
Three pages with scrawled Xs—each one to represent a kiss.

Last week a granddaughter she never knew sang on stage,
Luminous and radiant, in a band named Little Xs for Eyes.

For four decades in a letter in a purse in a suitcase in this attic
These galaxies of Xs were the banished eyes of a bewildered child.

But—unfolding them—I see myself stare out at who I am now,
Across this life I could never have envisaged as I scrawled
Untidy Xs for a woman I last saw smiling from a hospital bed,

Who sealed them in her purse when nurses shaved her head
In preparation for the operation she would never recover from:

Praying that one day I might open her purse and be surprised
To find my Xs returned to me: big Xs for kisses, little Xs for eyes.


Dermot Bolger