Three Poems by Erin O’Luanaigh

The Gold of Naples

Things kept reminding me of other things.
The old ladies in the street were my aunts.
A counterman at Caffè Mexico
was Totò in a soda fountain hat.
The rum babas were trumpet mutes.
My hanging Moka pots were little men
with barrel-of-monkeys arms. This garden
looked like Barcelona, that piazza
was a picture of a picture of Rome.
Vesuvius was a Crawford eyebrow
arched over the bay. My pizza oven
of an apartment was—it really was—
the apartment in The Gold of Naples,
and I was me, or some baked and dusky
version of myself, and I was alone
and half-delirious and overweight.
An Aussie tourist by a book stall turned
to me and said, “Those Japanese experts
say this place will blow at any moment.
If you thought Pompeii was trouble” —I did—
“just wait.” From my roof I watched the sunset
through a bottle of Strega, and it was
a John Martin painting, one of those camp
apocalyptic bugaboos. Now how
does the saying go? Resemblances are
just the shadows of differences… The end
of my world is the beginning of yours.

St. Catherine’s Wheel

Iconographers, great or amateur,
painted a thousand martyrs:

fair or preternatural,
banderoled or unspoken,

line-drawn or ghost-limbed,
resting their arms upon

a wagon wheel or spiked hula-hoop,
a sock-ring or sun-dial,

the head of a weed-whacker
or a deadly arc of cake.

If we know her, it is only by
the broken pattern of its shape.

Elegy

“If I cannot sing, I have the impression that I no longer exist.” — Montserrat Caballé

Somewhere else, someone is taking up Vaccai,
waking up her voice like a child for school.
It leaps out of bed, flexes without cursing,
too young, too simple to disobey commands,
and performs what older voices cannot do
because it doesn’t know what can’t be done.

You can hear her on the stair, singing solfege,
straight-toned, faceless as an empty spoon.
Soon, she’ll dream of marbles in her mouth,
of a sore throat that won’t cure, of the malebolge
where the diviners circle, heads backwards,
necks twisted in a pose forbidding sound.

It will start with age, with a push, with the thrill
of pain for a note that reaches higher, higher
again—and for five years, maybe ten, the voice,
bruised into renown, will shake the hearer
from his seat, will flush with held-off disaster,
until by doing, doing more, it comes undone.

Erin O’Luanaigh’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Subtropics, AGNI, 32 Poems, The Hopkins Review, and The New Criterion, among other journals. She is co-host of the film and literature podcast (sub)Text. She lives in Boston.