Bronze reins astream in his right, his gaze ahead
Empty as the space where the team should be,
His eyes-front, straight-backed posture like my own
Doing physio in the corridor, holding up
As if once more I’d found myself in step
Between two shafts, another’s hand on mine,
Each slither of the share, each stone it hit
Registered like a pulse in the timbered grips.
Miracle
Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in –
Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let-up
Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait
For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.
Human Chain
for Terence Brown
Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand
In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers
Firing over the mob, I was braced again
With a grip on two sack corners,
Two packed wads of grain I’d worked to lugs
To give me purchase, ready for the heave –
The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing
On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain
Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed
That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,
A letting go which will not come again.
Or it will, once. And for all.
The Baler
All day the clunk of a baler
Ongoing, cardiac-dull,
So taken for granted
It was evening before I came to
To what I was hearing
And missing: summer’s richest hours
As they had been to begin with,
Fork-lifted, sweated-through
And nearly rewarded enough
By the giddied-up race of a tractor
At the end of the day
Last-lapping a hayfield.
But what I also remembered
As woodpigeons sued at the edge
Of thirty gleaned acres
And I stood inhaling the cool
In a dusk eldorado
Of mighty cylindrical bales
Was Derek Hill’s saying,
The last time he sat at our table,
He could bear no longer to watch
The sun going down
And asking please to be put
With his back to the window.
Eelworks
I
To win the hand of the princess
What tasks the youngest son
Had to perform!
For me, the first to come a-courting
In the fish factor’s house,
It was to eat with them
An eel supper.
II
Cut of diesel oil in evening air,
Tractor engines in the clinker-built
Deep-bellied boats,
Landlubbers’ craft,
Heavy in water
As a cow down in a drain,
The men straight-backed,
Standing firm
At stern and bow –
Horse-and-cart men, really,
Glad when the adze-dressed keel
Cleaved to the mud.
Rum-and-peppermint men too
At the counter later on
In her father’s pub.
III
That skin Alfie Kirkwood wore
At school, sweaty-lustrous, supple
For the tying of itself around itself –
For strength, according to Alfie.
Who would ease his lapped wrist
From the flap-mouthed cuff
Of a jerkin rank with eel oil,
The abounding reek of it
Among our summer desks
My first encounter with the up close
That had to be put up with.
IV
Sweaty-lustrous too
The butt of the freckled
Elderberry shoot
I made a rod of,
A-fluster when I felt
Not tugging but a trailing
On the line, not the utter
Flip-stream frolic-fish
But a foot-long
Slither of a fellow,
A young eel, greasy grey
And rightly wriggle-spined,
Not yet the blueblack
Slick-backed waterwork
I’d live to reckon with,
My old familiar
Pearl-purl
Selkie-streaker.
V
‘That tree,’ said Walter de la Mare
(Summer in his rare, recorded voice
So I could imagine
A lawn beyond French windows
And downs in the middle distance)
‘That tree, saw it once
Struck by lightning … The bark –’
In his accent the ba-aak –
‘The bark came off it
Like a girl taking off her petticoat.’
White linen éblouissante
In a breath of air,
Sylph-flash made flesh,
Eelwork, sea-salt and dish cloth
Getting a first hold,
Then purchase for the thumb nail
And the thumb
Under a v-nick in the neck,
The skinpeel drawing down
Like silk
At a practised touch.
VI
On the hoarding and the signposts
‘Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Co-operative’,
But ever on our lips and at the weir
‘The eelworks’.
The Riverbank Field
after Virgil, Aeneid, vi, 704–15, 748–51
Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as
‘In a retired vale … a sequestered grove’
And I’ll confound the Lethe in Moyola
By coming through Back Park down from Grove Hill
Across Long Rigs on to the riverbank –
Which way, by happy chance, will take me past
The domos placidas, ‘those peaceful homes’
Of Upper Broagh. Moths then on evening water
It would have to be, not bees in sunlight,
Midge veils instead of lily beds; but stet
To all the rest: the willow leaves
Elysian-silvered, the grass so fully fledged
And unimprinted it can’t not conjure thoughts
Of passing spirit-troops, animae, quibus altera fato
Corpora debentur, ‘spirits,’ that is,
‘To whom second bodies are owed by fate’.
And now to continue, as enjoined to often,
‘In my own words’:
‘All these presences
Once they have rolled time’s wheel a thousand years
Are summoned here to drink the river water
So that memories of this underworld are shed
And soul is longing to dwell in flesh and blood
Under the dome of the sky.’
Route 110
for Anna Rose
I
In a stained front-buttoned shopcoat –
Sere brown piped with crimson –
Out of the Classics bay into an aisle
She emerges, absorbed in her coin-count,
Eyes front, right hand at work
In the slack marsupial vent
Of her change-pocket, thinking what to charge
For a used copy of Aeneid VI.
Dustbreath bestirred in the cubicle mouth
I inhaled as she slid my purchase
Into a deckle-edged brown paper bag.
II
Smithfield Market Saturdays. The pet shop
Fetid with droppings in the rabbit cages,
Melodious with canaries, green and gold,
But silent now as birdless Lake Avernus.
I hurried on, shortcutting to the buses,
Parrying the crush with my bagged Virgil,
Past booths and the jambs of booths with their displays
Of canvas schoolbags, maps, prints, plaster plaques,
Feather dusters, artificial flowers,
Then racks of suits and overcoats that swayed
When one was tugged from its overcrowded frame
Like their owners’ shades close-packed on Charon’s barge.
III
Once the driver wound a little handle
The destination names began to roll
Fast-forward in their panel, and everything
Came to life. Passengers
Flocked to the kerb like agitated rooks
Around a rookery, all go
But undecided. At which point the inspector
Who ruled the roost in bus station and bus
Separated and directed everybody
By calling not the names but the route numbers,
And so we scattered as instructed, me
For Route 110, Cookstown via Toome and Magherafelt.
IV
Tarpaulin-stiff, coal-black, sharp-cuffed as slate,
The standard-issue railway guard’s long coat
I bought once second-hand: suffering its scourge
At the neck and wrists was worth it even so
For the dismay I caused by doorstep night arrivals,
A creature of cold blasts and flap-winged rain.
And then, come finer weather, up and away
To Italy, in a wedding guest’s bargain suit
Of finest weave, loose-fitting, summery, grey
As Venus’ doves, hotfooting it with the tanned expats
Up their Etruscan slopes to a small brick chapel
To find myself the one there most at home.
V
Venus’ doves? Why not McNicholls’ pigeons
Out of their pigeon holes but homing still?
They lead unerringly to McNicholls’ kitchen
And a votive jampot on the dresser shelf.
So reach me not a gentian but stalks
From the bunch that stood in it, each head of oats
A silvered smattering, each individual grain
Wrapped in a second husk of glittering foil
They’d saved from chocolate bars, then pinched and cinched
‘To give the wee altar a bit of shine.’
The night old Mrs Nick, as she was to us,
Handed me one it as good as lit me home.
VI
It was the age of ghosts. Of hand-held flashlamps.
Lights moving at a distance scried for who
And why: whose wake, say, in which house on the road
In that direction – Michael Mulholland’s the first
I attended as a full participant,
Sitting up until the family rose
Like strangers to themselves and us. A wake
Without the corpse of their own dear ill-advised
Sonbrother swimmer, lost in the Bristol Channel.
For three nights we kept conversation going
Around the waiting trestles. By the fourth
His coffin, with the lid on, was in place.
VII
The corpse house then a house of hospitalities
Right through the small hours, the ongoing card game
Interrupted constantly by rounds
Of cigarettes on plates, biscuits, cups of tea,
The antiphonal recital of known events
And others rare, clandestine, undertoned.
Apt pupil in their night school, I walked home
On the last morning, my clothes as smoke-imbued
As if I’d fed a pyre, accompanied to the gable
By the mother, to point out a right of way
Across their fields, into our own back lane,
And absolve me thus formally of trespass.
VIII
As one when the month is young sees a new moon
Fading into daytime, again it is her face
At the dormer window, her hurt still new,
My look behind me hurried as I unlock,
Switch on, rev up, pull out and drive away
In the car she’ll not have taken her eyes off,
The brakelights flicker-flushing at the corner
Like red lamps swung by RUC patrols
In the small hours on pre-Troubles roads
After dances, after our holdings on
And holdings back, the necking
And nay-saying age of impurity.
IX
And what in the end was there left to bury
Of Mr Lavery, blown up in his own pub
As he bore the primed device and bears it still
Mid-morning towards the sun-admitting door
Of Ashley House? Or of Louis O’Neill
In the wrong place the Wednesday they buried
Thirteen who’d been shot in Derry? Or of bodies
Unglorified, accounted for and bagged
Behind the grief cordons: not to be laid
In war graves with full honours, nor in a separate plot
Fired over on anniversaries
By units drilled and spruce and unreconciled.
X
Virgil’s happy shades in pure blanched raiment
Contend on their green meadows, while Orpheus
Weaves among them, sweeping strings, aswerve
To the pulse of his own playing and to avoid
The wrestlers, dancers, runners on the grass.
Not unlike a sports day in Bellaghy,
Slim Whitman’s wavering tenor amplified
Above sparking dodgems, flying chair-o-planes,
A mile of road with parked cars in the twilight
And teams of grown men stripped for action
Going hell for leather until the final whistle,
Leaving stud-scrapes on the pitch and on each other.
XI
Those evenings when we’d just wait and watch
And fish. Then the evening the otter’s head
Appeared in the flow, or was it only
A surface-ruck and gleam we took for
An otter’s head? No doubting, all the same,
The gleam, a turnover warp in the black
Quick water. Or doubting the solid ground
Of the riverbank field, twilit and a-hover
With midge-drifts, as if we had commingled
Among shades and shadows stirring on the brink
And stood there waiting, watching,
Needy and ever needier for translation.
XII
And now the age of births. As when once
At dawn from the foot of our back garden
The last to leave came with fresh-plucked flowers
To quell whatever smells of drink and smoke
Would linger on where mother and child were due
Later that morning from the nursing home,
So now, as a thank-offering for one
Whose long wait on the shaded bank has ended,
I arrive with my bunch of stalks and silvered heads
Like tapers that won’t dim
As her earthlight breaks and we gather round
Talking baby talk.
Wraiths
for Ciaran Carson
I Sidhe
She took me into the ground, the spade-marked
Clean-cut inside of a dugout
Meant for calves.
Dung on the floor, a
damp gleam
And seam of sand like white gold
In the earth wall, nicked fibres in the roof.
We stood under the hill, out of the day
But faced towards the daylight, holding hands,
Inhaling the excavated bank.
Zoom in over our shoulders,
A tunnelling shot that accelerates and flares.
Discover us against weird brightness. Cut.
II Parking Lot
We were wraiths in the afternoon.
The bus had stopped. There was neither waiting room
Nor booth nor bench, only a parking lot
Above the town, open as a hillfort,
A panned sky and a light wind blowing.
We were on our way to the Gaeltacht,