Tracy K. Smith


to be lustful – carries strong connotations of desire. Lines 10–13, while ostensibly describing the speaker and Mauricio running through the house, are also heavy with double entendre: ‘Breath after breath charging/ In and out. Heavy, heavy,/ And then weightless, moving/ With the prescience of light.’We can see how the poet may also be describing the young couple making love (even if in lines 21–31 she reveals that this didn’t happen) by using short, staccato sentences and repetition to convey the heavy breathing, the sexual act itself and the feeling of bliss afterwards.


The only dialogue of Mauricio’s in the poem is the earthy ‘Hazlo que te da/ La puta gana’, which he says not just once, but ‘Over and over’. The speaker describes Mauricio with the evocative adjective ‘Enormous’ and the description of Mauricio’s legs as ‘drunken’, Smith uses a rather lovely simile to describe his hands: ‘And hands as large/ And white as magnolias—’.


 past relationships: ‘What would’ve really happened/ If we’d done it that night/ In your neighbourhood/ At the end of the world?’ The speaker recognises that, despite the seediness of the setting, their union could have changed everything – including, potentially, the course of both their lives: ‘What would we have changed,/ Splayed together on that/ Rotten mattress’. The adjective ‘splayed’ connotes sexual abandon, while the adjective ‘rotten’ conveys the sordid interior setting. In contrast, the exterior ‘While the buses slept’. The alliteration used in the following lines, ‘And the papers curled/ Around themselves,/ Cradling their news’, through the words ‘curled’ and ‘cradling’, is a skilful and appealing way to describe the rolled-up newspapers protectively enveloping the news within their pages, in the same way that a lover might cradle their partner.


In the third stanza, the speaker directly addresses all of her exes, and she tells us she has decided to call them all Mauricio, which explains the epigraph at the beginning of the poem: ‘I want to speak now/ To the ones I’ve said/ Meant nothing,/ And I want to call them all/ Mauricio.’ The use of the past tense in ‘I’ve said/ Meant nothing’ suggests that they did, in fact, mean something. So, this poem is not just addressed to one individual   to describe his youthful skin:  She describes him as a ‘Boy on the cusp’. By ‘cusp’ she means on the very brink of manhood. This can be a time of great vulnerability for a young man, but for now, he is just a young teenager ‘on a bicycle/ On the porch [her] father put up.’ The speaker must have been a similar age to the 13-year-old ‘Mauricio’, and her tremulous tone shows that she was just as vulnerable as him: ‘Did I stare at my lap,/ Wishing myself someone else?’ This rhetorical question captures the uncertainty of adolescence. The inclination to compare ourselves with others at this stage of life is often irresistible, and here, the speaker compares herself to ‘Kathy, with the wild limbs,/ A fast girl with bracelets/ That made music on her wrists’. The words she uses to describe Kathy are lively and vital (‘wild’ and ‘fast’), and she can even make music when she moves because the bangles on her wrists clink together. Yet ‘fast’ is also slang for someone who is considered too quick to engage in sexual activities.


‘And the starlings perched/ In rafters—did I invent them?’ Here, the speaker  always completely trustworthy. Sometimes we misremember, confuse dreams with memories or simply remember things the way we wish they had happened, rather than how they actually did.


LEAVING CERTIFICATE HIGHER LEVEL 441


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