Before the poem gives us a single person, it gives us stone. "The family history / Is written on rock" is a passive sentence with nobody doing the writing, as if the past hardened without anyone's hand. That detail matters later. The opening makes history something fixed and external, carved into a surface that can't be revised, and the rest of the poem tests what a living person can do against that.
The image of "six distinct windows, / Each facing heaven" is strange, because a window is something you look through, and these are set in rock and turned upward. Judging by what follows, they read most naturally as six graves, openings in a family plot pointed at the sky. The colon after "heaven" works like a hinge. What looked like a hopeful picture of glass and light swings round into "A corpse garden, / Full of corpse flowers." The stanza has no verb, only a label. The word "corpse" is stamped twice, so the garden is saturated with death. A "corpse flower" is also the name of a real plant known for smelling of rot, so the flowers may be beautiful and foul at once. Either way, the one place where things should grow produces only the dead, and the upward gaze of "heaven" is cancelled by the ground below.
Only in the third stanza does a person arrive. The name "Fogarty" has been waiting in the title, and now it comes with a verdict: "the last." The family line ends with him. The explanation is oddly clinical: "the pain / Of twelve hips broken." It is tempting to do the sum. Six windows, two hips each, makes twelve. If that is the intended arithmetic, the pain is not Fogarty's alone but the accumulated injury of his whole line, passed down like a surname. The number sounds like a medical record and a curse at once, and the poem never says which.
The syntax in this final stanza is the poem's boldest move. The first two stanzas are end-stopped and still. Now one long sentence runs across seven lines, with its main verb held back behind interruptions ("And, because of the pain / Of twelve hips broken"). We wait through all that qualification for the plain fact that "He never spoke." The silence is a consequence of pain, and the delay in the grammar makes us feel it. Then "Until" appears twice. The first, "Until he joined them," is the bluntest possible phrase for dying, with no softening and no mention of heaven. If the poem stopped there, silence would end simply because life did.
The second "until" pushes past that: "Until his hands drew blood / From stone." Here the idiom of getting blood from a stone, which means asking the impossible, is made literal. The sentence leaves open whose blood it is, the hands' or the rock's. "Drew" also pulls two ways, since it can mean to extract and to make a mark. That sets up an echo with the opening, where history was "written on rock." One reading is that Fogarty, who has had no voice, finally writes his own line into the family record, and the only ink he has is blood. The poem doesn't insist on this. It lets the image stay physical and a little frightening.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are short and plain. The stanzas run four lines, then two, then seven, so the shortest, most static image sits in the middle and the longest movement comes last. The closing words, "drew blood / From stone," are all single syllables and heavy to say aloud. The poem ends on a hard, unornamented sound and returns to the material it began with, rock becoming stone.
What makes "Fogarty" significant is how much it folds into so few words. It treats a family as an inheritance of injury and silence, and it questions the comfort of the word "heaven" without any argument. Its last image is also hard to settle. The grave is usually where speech ends, but here it is where the one wordless man finally leaves a mark.