Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Two
November- December 2025
Carlow Poem #39, poems by Derek Coyle.
Carlow Poem #39
I remember listening to Parsley,
Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme. My dad’s record player,
the seventies or eighties living room,
depending where your eye landed.
Art Garfunkel, ethereal in the speakers,
a faint crackle. ‘For Emily,
Whenever I May Find Her,’ the rise
and swell of his voice. ‘Crinoline
…and lamplight.’ I saw fields
of ripened wheat damp in the rain.
I must play you this song.
Even though it will probably
make no sense to you. How to convey
the meaning of a sentence we’ve run
through our fingers, weighing up the words
like a village grocer measuring out sugar?
Sifting through others, like braille, or a rosary.
How we hold a line close to the heart.
What I didn’t see in those dreams,
what I didn’t hear between the lines
of Paul Simon’s song, was you
striding through the hall of my house,
your cap on your head,
the green one with the brown-
and-red lined squares – the one you bought
in T.K. Maxx in Kilkenny,
and wore to Cork all that weekend,
our first trip away.
It’s like the way Paul Simon
wrote the song, but Art Garfunkel
filled it full of feeling. Sometimes,
the way you move your hands
to your glasses, to re-arrange them,
to get them back in place,
although they’ve hardly moved,
is enough.
Carlow Poem #121
The way the head
rises up and out of the stone,
almost like fizz
surging to the top
of a soda. Is it joy
in Mahler’s face, or satisfaction
—how Rodin felt
after he laid down his chisel?
He had found some kind
of answer – man accounts
for nothing, stone everything.
Still, the flex of muscle,
the feel of flesh
laid bare in marble.
The receding hairline.
The bumps in the brow.
This stone has captured it all.
Something is stored here.
Rodin spoke no German.
Mahler spoke no French.
Something is exchanged
beyond words. Rodin
decides to call it ‘Mozart’.
Despite the fact, he later claimed,
Mahler had a head like Benjamin Franklin,
or was it Frederick the Great?
Carlow Poem #89
It is like biting
into a raw slice of that dun rhizome,
ginger. Pungent,
insistent and exotic, these thoughts
I have sitting outside the Irish bar
on Guantanamo Bay. I’m thinking
about Gustav Mahler as a kid.
He follows the local brass band
home, the pulse of their march,
the vibrato of the brass,
dances inside his ear.
In Cambridge, England,
in discrete corners
of the universities’ gardens,
you can dig up a fungus
the locals call the jelly ear.
I eat one in my mind’s eye.
Poetry sprouts abundant,
its tangled mycelium
settles itself into my nooks
and crannies. Like music.
The way Mahler heard cowbells
at the centre of his symphony,
or the twitter of a bird
flittering over the woodwinds.
I see him in his music hut,
lying down on the floor,
like a frog doing yoga,
meditating, motionless,
as the wind gently moves
the world outside his door.
© Derek Coyle
Derek Coyle’s Reading John Ashbery in Costa Coffee Carlow (2019) was shortlisted for the Shine Strong 2020 award for best first collection. Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster (2024) is published in a dual language edition in Tranas, Sweden.
His poems have appeared in The Irish Times, Irish Pages, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Texas Literary Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Orbis, Skylight 47, Assaracus, The High Window and The Stony Thursday Book.
He reviews books regularly, and he has written literary essays on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, John Montague, James Schuyler and Paula Meehan. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s, Ireland.