BIO
T.S. Kerrigan was born March 15, 1939 in Los Angeles. He attended the University of California, Berkeley and received his law degree from Loyola University in Los Angeles. Kerrigan is not only a poet, but a playwright. He is the author of “Branches Among the Stars” (Louisville, 1990). His plays have been produced in Los Angeles at the Ensemble Studio Theatre (where he formerly served as a member of the Board of Directors) and at the Globe Playhouse.
Kerrigan’s poetry has appeared in various periodicals, both in the United States and in Europe, including: Southern Review, International Poetry Review, Poetry Monthly, Kansas Quarterly, Pacific Review, Tennessee Quarterly. Another Bloomsday at Molly Malone’s Pub, a collection of poetry, was published by Inevitable Press in 1999. Kerrigan’s work has recently been included in Good Poems, a new anthology by Garrison Keillor, published by Viking-Penguin in 2002.
CROWS ON A TELEGRAPH WIRE
Church of the Assumption
Collooney, County Sligo
We saw that cloud of shabby pilgrims pass,
Then settle down along the wire,
The day you came to drag me off to mass.
We heard they huddled there through half that day,
A flock of twenty crows or more
That neither wind nor rain could drive away.
I wondered through the chants of morning prayer,
While others sought salvation’s keys,
What instinct drew that dark assemblage there,
As though some intercession, heaven sent,
Now stirred within their fragile bones,
To make that flock of creatures reverent.
The grey-eyed priest declared there’d been a sign,
A symbol of enduring faith,
Those crows were man, that Babel, the divine.
CONVERSATION BY THE ZURICHSEE
Jung offered Joyce a triton shell
That summer on the Zurichsee,
Advising him to listen well.
Joyce looked with half-disguised disdain.
Could flim flam end his daughter’s fits
Or quell the storm inside her brain.?
He’d suffered through her nightly screams,
Her frequent disappearances;
His own spate of disturbing dreams.
He put the shell against his ear
(He’d play the psychomeddler’s game).
“I’ll tell, Herr Doctor, what I hear:
The murmurs of that deep,” he said;
“That sea with no defining coasts
That joins the living with the dead.”
“You’ll never make Lucia well;
“She’ll perish in that sea,” said Jung;
“You plunged into its depths – she fell.”
…..
