For now that it was gone, it all seemed
Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh.
And he was changed: a foreigner among them.
DISTRICT AND CIRCLE
Tunes from a tin whistle underground
Curled up a corridor I’d be walking down
To where I knew I was always going to find
My watcher on the tiles, cap by his side,
His fingers perked, his two eyes eyeing me
In an unaccusing look I’d not avoid,
Or not just yet, since both were out to see
For ourselves.
As the music larked and capered
I’d trigger and untrigger a hot coin
Held at the ready, but now my gaze was lowered
For was our traffic not in recognition?
Accorded passage, I would re-pocket and nod,
And he, still eyeing me, would also nod.
Posted, eyes front, along the dreamy ramparts
Of escalators ascending and descending
To a monotonous slight rocking in the works,
We were moved along, upstanding.
Elsewhere, underneath, an engine powered,
Rumbled, quickened, evened, quieted.
The white tiles gleamed. In passages that flowed
With draughts from cooler tunnels, I missed the light
Of all-overing, long since mysterious day,
Parks at lunchtime where the sunners lay
On body-heated mown grass regardless,
A resurrection scene minutes before
The resurrection, habitués
Of their garden of delights, of staggered summer.
Another level down, the platform thronged.
I re-entered the safety of numbers,
A crowd half straggle-ravelled and half strung
Like a human chain, the pushy newcomers
Jostling and purling underneath the vault,
On their marks to be first through the doors,
Street-loud, then succumbing to herd-quiet …
Had I betrayed or not, myself or him?
Always new to me, always familiar,
This unrepentant, now repentant turn
As I stood waiting, glad of a first tremor,
Then caught up in the now-or-never whelm
Of one and all the full length of the train.
Stepping on to it across the gap,
On to the carriage metal, I reached to grab
The stubby black roof-wort and take my stand
From planted ball of heel to heel of hand
As sweet traction and heavy down-slump stayed me.
I was on my way, well girded, yet on edge,
Spot-rooted, buoyed, aloof,
Listening to the dwindling noises off,
My back to the unclosed door, the platform empty;
And wished it could have lasted,
That long between-times pause before the budge
And glaze-over, when any forwardness
Was unwelcome and bodies readjusted,
Blindsided to themselves and other bodies.
So deeper into it, crowd-swept, strap-hanging,
My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail,
My father’s glazed face in my own waning
And craning …
Again the growl
Of shutting doors, the jolt and one-off treble
Of iron on iron, then a long centrifugal
Haulage of speed through every dragging socket.
And so by night and day to be transported
Through galleried earth with them, the only relict
Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward,
Reflecting in a window mirror-backed
By blasted weeping rock-walls.
Flicker-lit.
TO GEORGE SEFERIS IN THE UNDERWORLD
The men began arguing about the spiky bushes that were in brilliant
yellow bloom on the slopes: were they caltrop or gorse? … “That
reminds me of something,” said George. “I don’t know …”
That greeny stuff about your feet
is asphodel and rightly so,
but why do I think seggans?
And of a spring day
in your days of ‘71: Poseidon
making waves in sea and air
around Cape Sounion, its very name
all ozone-breeze and cavern-boom,
too utterly this-worldly, George, for you
intent upon an otherworldly scene
somewhere just beyond
the summit ridge, the cutting edge
of not remembering.
The bloody light. To hell with it.
Close eyes and concentrate.
Not crown of thorns, not sceptre reed
or Herod’s court, but ha!
you had it! A harrowing, yes, in hell:
the hackle-spikes
that Plato told of, the tyrant’s fate
in a passage you would quote:
“They bound him hand and foot,
they flung him down and flayed him,
gashing his flesh on thorny aspalathoi,
and threw him into Tartarus, torn to shreds.”
As was only right
for a tyrant. But still, for you, maybe
too much i’ the right, too black and white,
if still your chance to strike
against his ilk,
a last word meant to break
your much contested silence.
And for me a chance to test the edge
of seggans, dialect blade
hoar and harder and more hand-to-hand
than what is common usage nowadays:
sedge—marshmallow, rubber-dagger stuff.
WORDSWORTH’S SKATES
Star in the window.
Slate scrape.
Bird or branch?
Or the whet and scud of steel on placid ice?
Not the bootless runners lying toppled
In dust in a display case,
Their bindings perished,
But the reel of them on frozen Windermere
As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its curve
And left it scored.
THE HARROW-PIN
We’d be told, “If you don’t behave
There’ll be nothing in your Christmas stocking for you
But an old kale stalk.” And we would believe him.
But if kale meant admonition, a harrow-pin
Was correction’s veriest unit.
Head-banged spike, forged fang, a true dead ringer
Out of a harder time, it was a stake
He’d drive through aspiration and pretence
For our instruction.
Let there once be any talk of decoration,
A shelf for knick-knacks, a picture-hook or -rail,
And the retort was instant: “Drive a harrow-pin.”
Brute-forced, rusted, haphazardly set pins
From harrows wrecked by horse-power over stones
Lodged in the stable wall and on them hung
Horses’ collars lined with sweat-veined ticking,
Old cobwebbed reins and hames and eye-patched winkers,
The tackle of the mighty, simple dead.
Out there, in musts of bedding cut with piss
He put all to the test. Inside, in the house,
Ungulled, irreconcilable,
And horse-sensed as the travelled Gulliver,
What virtue he approved (and would assay)
POET TO BLACKSMITH
Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin’s (1748–84) instructions to
Séamus MacGearailt, translated from the Irish
Séamus, make me a side-arm to take on the earth,
A suitable tool for digging and grubbing the ground,
Lightsome and pleasant to lean on or cut with or lift,
Tastily finished and tr
im and right for the hand.
No trace of the hammer to show on the sheen of the blade,
The thing to have purchase and spring and be fit for the strain,
The shaft to be socketed in dead true and dead straight,
And I’ll work with the gang till I drop and never complain.
The plate and the edge of it not to be wrinkly or crooked—
I see it well shaped from the anvil and sharp from the file,
The grain of the wood and the line of the shaft nicely fitted,
And best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell.
MIDNIGHT ANVIL
If I wasn’t there
When Barney Devlin hammered
The midnight anvil
I can still hear it: twelve blows
Struck for the millennium.
His nephew heard it
In Edmonton, Alberta:
The cellular phone
Held high as a horse’s ear,
Barney smiling to himself.
Afterwards I thought
Church bels beyond the starres heard
And then imagined
Barney putting it to me:
“You’ll maybe write a poem.”
What I’ll do instead
Is quote those waterburning
Medieval smiths:
“Huf, puf! Lus, bus! Col!” Such noise
On nights heard no one never.
And Eoghan Rua
Asking Séamus MacGearailt
To forge him a spade
Sharp, well shaped from the anvil,
And ringing sweet as a bell.
SÚGÁN
The fluster of that soft supply and feed—
Hay being coaxed in handfuls from a ruck,
Paid out to be taken in by furl and swivel,
Turned and tightened, rickety-rick, to rope—
Though just as often at the other end
I’d manipulate the hook,
Walking backwards, winding for all I was worth
By snag and by sag the long and the short of it
To make ends mesh—
in my left hand
The cored and threaded elderberry haft,
In my right the fashioned wire,
breeze on my back,
Sun in my face, a power to bind and loose
Eked out and into each last tug and lap.
SENIOR INFANTS
1. The Sally Rod
On the main street of Granard I met Duffy
Whom I had known before the age of reason
In short trousers in the Senior Infants’ room
Where once upon a winter’s day Miss Walls
Lost her head and cut the legs off us
For dirty talk we didn’t think she’d hear.
“Well, for Jesus’ sake,” cried Duffy, coming at me
With his stick in the air and two wide open arms,
“For Jesus’ sake! D’you mind the sally rod?”
2. A Chow
I’m staring at the freshly scratched initials
Of Robert Donnelly in the sandstone coping
Of Anahorish Bridge, with Robert Donnelly
Beside me, also staring at them.
“Have a chow of this stuff,” stripping a dulse-thin film
Off the unwrapped ounce of Warhorse Plug—
Bog-bank brown, embossed, forbidden man-fruit
He’s just been sent to buy for his father, Jock.
The roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to
At the burning-out of a neighbour, I want to lick
Bran from a bucket, grit off the coping stone.
“You have to spit,” says Robert, “a chow’s no good
Unless you spit like hell,” his ginger calf’s lick
Like a scorch of flame, his quid-spurt fulgent.
3. One Christmas Day in the Morning
Tommy Evans must be sixty now as well. The last time I saw him was at the height of the Troubles, in Phil McKeever’s pub in Castledawson, the first time we’d met since Anahorish School. I felt as free as a bird, a Catholic at large in Tommy’s airspace.
Yet something small prevailed. My father balked at a word like “Catholic” being used in company. Phil asked if we were OK. Tommy’s crowd fenced him with “What are you having, Tommy?”
I was blabbing on about guns, how they weren’t a Catholic thing, how the sight of the one in his house had always scared me, how our very toys at Christmas proved my point—when his eye upon me narrowed.
I remembered his air-gun broken over his forearm, my envy of the polished hardwood stock, him thumbing the pellets into their aperture. The snick of the thing then as he clipped it shut and danced with his eye on the sights through a quick-quick angle of ninety degrees and back, then drilled the pair of us left-right to the back of the house.
The Evans’s chicken coop was the shape of a sentry-box, walls and gable of weathered tongue-and-groove, the roofing-felt plied tight and tacked to the eaves. And there above the little neat-hinged door, balanced on the very tip of the apex, was Tommy’s target: the chrome lid of the bell of his father’s bike. Whose little zings fairly brought me to my senses.
THE NOD
Saturday evenings we would stand in line
In Loudan’s butcher shop. Red beef, white string,
Brown paper ripped straight off for parcelling
Along the counter edge. Rib roast and shin
Plonked down, wrapped up, and bow-tied neat and clean
But seeping blood. Like dead weight in a sling,
Heavier far than I had been expecting
While my father shelled out for it, coin by coin.
Saturday evenings too the local B-Men,
Unbuttoned but on duty, thronged the town,
Neighbours with guns, parading up and down,
Some nodding at my father almost past him
As if deliberately they’d aimed and missed him
Or couldn’t seem to place him, not just then.
A CLIP
Harry Boyle’s one-room, one-chimney house
With its settle bed was our first barber shop.
We’d go not for a haircut but “a clip”:
Cold smooth creeping steel and snicking scissors,
The strong-armed chair, the plain mysteriousness
Of your sheeted self inside that neck-tied cope—
Half sleeveless surplice, half hoodless Ku Klux cape.
Harry Boyle’s one-roomed, old bog-road house
Near enough to home but unfamiliar:
What was it happened there?
Weeds shoulder-high up to the open door,
Harry not shaved, close breathing in your ear,
Loose hair in windfalls blown across the floor
Under the collie’s nose. The collie’s stare.
EDWARD THOMAS ON THE LAGANS ROAD
He’s not in view but I can hear a step
On the grass-crowned road, the whip of daisy heads
On the toes of boots.
Behind the hedge
Eamon Murphy and Teresa Brennan—
Fully clothed, strong-arming each other—
Have sensed him and gone quiet. I keep on watching
As they rise and go.
And now the road is empty.
Nothing but air and light between their love-nest
And the bracken hillside where I lie alone.
Utter evening, as it was in the beginning.
Until the remembered come and go of lovers
Brings on his long-legged self on the Lagans Road—
Edward Thomas in his khaki tunic
Like one of the Evans brothers out of Leitrim,
Demobbed, “not much changed,” sandy moustached and
freckled
From being, they said, with Monty in the desert.
FOUND PROSE
1. The Lagans Road
The Lagans Road ran for about three qu
arters of a mile across an area of wetlands. It was one of those narrow country roads with weeds in the middle, grass verges, and high hedges on either side, and all around it marsh and rushes and little shrubs and birch trees. For a minute or two every day, therefore, you were in the wilderness, but on the first morning I went to school it was as if the queen of elfland was leading me away. The McNicholls were neighbours and Philomena McNicholl had been put in charge of me during those first days. Ginger hair, freckled face, green gymfrock—a fey, if ever there was one. I remember my first sight of the school, a couple of low-set Nissen huts raising their corrugated backs above the hedges. From about a quarter of a mile away I could see youngsters running about in the road in front of the buildings and hear shouting in the playground. Years later, when I read an account of how the Indians of the Pacific Northwest foresaw their arrival in the land of the dead—coming along a forest path where other travellers’ cast-offs lay scattered on the bushes, hearing voices laughing and calling, knowing there was a life in the clearing up ahead that would be familiar, but feeling at the same time lost and homesick—it struck me I had already experienced that kind of arrival. Next thing in the porch I was faced with rows of coathooks nailed up at different heights along the wall, so that everyone in the different classes could reach them, everyone had a place to hang overcoat or scarf and proceed to the strange room, where our names were new in the roll-book and would soon be called.
2. Tall Dames
Even though we called them “the gypsies,” we knew that gypsies were properly another race. They inhabited the land of Eros, glimpsed occasionally when the circus rolled into a field and a fortune-teller, swathed in her silks and beads, inclined to us from the back door of a caravan. The people we called “the gypsies” we would now call travellers, although at that time in that place “tinker” was an honourable term, signifying tin-smiths, whitesmiths, pony keepers, regulars on the doorstep, squatters on the long acre. Marvellous upfront women in unerotic woollen shawls, woven in big tartan patterns of tan and mossy green, their baskets full of dyed wooden flowers, their speech cadenced to beg and keep begging with all the stamina of a cantor. Walking the roads in ones and twos, children on their arms or at their heels. Squaws of the ditchback, in step with Yeats’s “tall dames” walking in Avalon.