Title: Brief Visitation

Author: Vincent O'Sullivan

In: Sport 29: Spring 2002

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, October 2002

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Verse Literature

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Sport 29: Spring 2002

Brief Visitation

page 6

Brief Visitation

The word had got round, ‘The gods are back.’
Some kid better known for lies than good sense
came in shaking from smoking near the lake,
‘This joker,’ he said, ‘looking real dirty at me

then I saw he was only halfway, like.
The rest of him was goat. Jesus,’ he said,
and his father clipped him one. ‘A bit of respect,’
the old man demanded, ‘you foul-mouthed young

prick!’ Next thing a librarian said this hunk
bigger than Rambo limps into Reference,
‘You'd think he'd been cleaning flues,’ she said,
‘his arms were that black.’ And he says he's

after Blacksmiths, anything she's got. So she
hands him one down from a high shelf
and pretty near tumbles. There he is! this
same bloke made of brass on the cover—

‘Should have seen the shield,’ he said,
‘that galoot went and lost.’ Monsignor
Fox, seventy and revered, still into
his Latin that's how out of touch, he's

walking behind the Lourdes grotto down
from the convent and this woman steps out
starkers, he'd read as a student of course
about goblets moulded on Aphrodite's

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breasts, about men seared by her romping
at them through surf—and there's the old fellow
grabbing at roses, dropping his glasses,
not giving a sacristan's toss for the thorns

etching his wrists, he's strewing the summer
as she steps up lightly, laughing, he laughs
back, he says ‘Jesus!’ like that boy did
only no one there to tick him off.

So it went. Lightning flashed half the afternoon
and mums advising Just don't talk to it, then,
never mind how nice the swan feels; say
No if the white bull offers his back,

plushy makes no difference. They wandered about
not as if they owned the place because
they knew they didn't, but more or less
at ease, that was the thing, as if we'd

been away and come back and they
implied, That's all right then, you're always
welcome. Water tasted sharper for a week
or two, we found we watched the sky

a lot more than we used, we touched
trees and rocks and felt them like it. Music
was fragrant everywhere without your
knowing where, no one clicked sex on the Net,

there was that too. Everyone had their
story. Oh the flatness the morning the leaves
didn't quiver near the lake, when ‘Miss Rosa’
as we called her no longer splashed out,

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when the bull wasn't in sight and the swan
flown and the pretty guy with the strung
bow didn't wow them at the bus stop.
Remember, that's what it comes to now,

about the saddest word we've used—
when you think how many there were, how
every corner was in bloom, if you know
what I mean. When the word got round.