Morrissey's "Clothes"

CLOTHES

Once they come undone, there's no stopping the undoing
Of all that keeps us us and not we.
From a room full of history and underwear
I throw out my diary and walk naked.

Until we're talking of weather again,
Contact shrunk back to wherever it sprang from.
And I'm begging for it all, coat, hat, gloves, scarf --
Shoes shod in iron, and a waterproof.

--Sinead Morrissey,

from There was Fire in Vancouver,
Carcanet Press Ltd., Manchester, England,
1996.

Sinead Morrissey: "& Forgive Us Our Trespasses"

& FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES  

Of which the first is love. The sad, unrepeatable fact
that the loves we shouldn’t foster burrow faster and linger longer
than sanctioned kinds can. Loves that thrive on absence, on lack
of return, or worse, on harm, are unkillable, Father.
They do not die in us. And you know how we’ve tried.
Loves nursed, inexplicably, on thoughts of sex,
a return to touched places, a backwards glance, a sigh -
they come back like the tide. They are with us at the terminus
when cancer catches us. They have never been away.
Forgive us the people we love – their dragnet influence.
Those disallowed to us, those who frighten us, those who stay
on uninvited in our lives and every night revisit us.
Accept from us the inappropriate
by which our dreams and daily scenes stay separate.   

--Sinead Morrissey