Mark Murphy

THE SLEEPING FATHER

My father is asleep with a book over his face.
His brow is all perspiration. Beads of sweat
    roll down his chest.
    His breathing

is heavy and staggered in the dusty August heat.
I think it must be the warmest day of the summer
    so far. I watch him closely,
    taking great care

not to wake him. The gramophone spindle is loaded
with 78's performing a hushed balancing act, poised
    on the brink of something
    momentous.

A daddy-long-legs whirrs at the ceiling by the paper
lampshade. Today is a good day to be alive.
    It is a good day to be
    seven years old.

A sudden light penetrates the curtains, catching
the buckle of his wrist watch. His arms are brown
    and thick from working
    in the sun.

His shoulders are red and peeling like pomegranate.
It is an easy picture to summon. The memory
    of it is larger
    than life.

My attention wanders to some mad scheme or daydream.
I chase down the hallway in search of tin soldiers.
    I fight the battle to end
    all battles.

The house is quiet. No voices. No traffic on the road.
Just soundless heat. And my father fast asleep
    in his favourite chair,
    out like a light.

* * *

MANAGEABLE SPACE*

Anyone acquainted with
the ideas of Herr Freud
will be glad to learn

as I did,
that we are not alone
in our anxieties;

even the good
professor suffered
bouts of agoraphobia,

which is no laughing matter,
since the response
is one of terror.

Asked what it was
that caused the fear,
he might have said

it was his childhood,
an early memory of steam
trains, the action

of the pistons, or
that the rattling
of the carriage mimicked

death. Imagine then,
a lake or reservoir -
nothing too disturbing.

You are standing
at the water's edge,
you see yourself

from a great distance.
What do you see
but a human dot?

You need to get away
from the water, the expanse
is too much, too blue.

You need to get back
to the world
of enclosure, the world

of manageable space.
Now imagine Sigmund's train.
On such journeys

the mind is lost.
The reasonable world is lost
to the opening out

of an unfamiliar landscape,
hills and mountains,
estuaries and flood plains,

where the desire to get free
is contradicted
by the desire to hide.

At last, you can put
yourself in the shoes
of the good professor.

* "Manageable Space" was first published in Poetry Salzburg Review.

Mark Murphy was born in the UK in 1969. He studied philosophy as an under-graduate and poetry at Masters level. He has had two chapbooks published, Tin Cat Alley (Spout Publications) and Our Little Bit Of Immortality (Erbacce Press). His first full length collection, Night-watch Man and Muse is due out in 2013 from Salmon Poetry (Eire).