Bois d’Ombrie

for Seamus Heaney

It could be overwhelming in this room,
so many laurelled heads, their talk replete
with carrots dangled, first names dropped (assumed,
of course, one knows of whom the speaker speaks).
Post-prandial tobacco from the pouch,
tamped into pipes, exhales its sweetly damp
sienna on the air. We take the couch
(he seems to wish to flee his sycophants)
and warm the cognac offered, caramel
and fiery, in tiny crystal glasses.

It’s both delicious and medicinal,
I say (who me? say silly things when nervous?)
He sets me right at ease, Like poetry
a wee bit, no? Delighting and instructing?
It’s hard to hear that lilt and not to think
of peat smoke rising, umber-black, from chimneys,
and fog as thick as cream on coffee, laced
(delicious and medicinal?) with Jameson.

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Moira Egan

Moira Egan’s seventh collection, Synæsthesium, won The New Criterion Poetry Prize and will be published in fall, 2017. Her work has won many awards and has appeared, in the U.S. and abroad, in numerous journals and anthologies. With her husband, Damiano Abeni, she has published more than a dozen volumes in translation in Italy, by authors such as Ashbery, Barth, Bender, Ferlinghetti, Hecht, Simic, Strand, Charles Wright, and others. She lives in Rome. 

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Author: Moira Egan

Moira Egan’s seventh collection, Synæsthesium, won The New Criterion Poetry Prize and will be published in fall, 2017. Her work has won many awards and has appeared, in the U.S. and abroad, in numerous journals and anthologies. With her husband, Damiano Abeni, she has published more than a dozen volumes in translation in Italy, by authors such as Ashbery, Barth, Bender, Ferlinghetti, Hecht, Simic, Strand, Charles Wright, and others. She lives in Rome.  View all posts by Moira Egan