Drip-paint it in blood,
The Wood Road as is and was,
Resurfaced, never widened,
The milk-churn deck and the sign
For the bus-stop overgrown.
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.
Derry Derry Down
I
The lush
Sunset blush
On a big ripe
Gooseberry:
I scratched my hand
Reaching in
To gather it
Off the bush,
Unforbidden,
In Annie Devlin’s
Overgrown
Back garden.
II
In the storybook
Back kitchen
Of The Lodge
The full of a white
Enamel bucket
Of little pears:
Still life
On the red tiles
Of that floor.
Sleeping beauty
I came on
By the scullion’s door.
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
And bisected into tails
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
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’.
Slack
I
Not coal dust, more the weighty grounds of coal
The lorryman would lug in open bags
And vent into a corner,
A sullen pile
But soft to the shovel, accommodating
As the clattering coal was not.
In days when life prepared for rainy days
It lay there, slumped and waiting
To dampen down and lengthen out
The fire, a check on mammon
And in its own way
Keeper of the flame.
II
The sound it made
More to me
Than any allegory.
Slack schlock.
Scuttle scuffle.
Shak-shak.
And those words –
‘Bank the fire’ –
Every bit as solid as
The cindery skull
Formed when its tarry
Coral cooled.
III
Out in the rain,
Sent out for it
Again
Stand in the unlit
Coalhouse door
And take in
Its violet blet,
Its wet sand weight,
Remembering it
Tipped and slushed
Catharsis
From the bag.
A Herbal
after Guillevic’s ‘Herbier de Bretagne’
Everywhere plants
Flourish among graves,
Sinking their roots
In all the dynasties
Of the dead.
*
Was graveyard grass
In our place
Any different?
Different from ordinary
Field grass?
Remember how you wanted
The sound recordist
To make a loop,
Wildtrack of your feet
Through the wet
At the foot of a field?
*
Yet for all their lush
Compliant dialect
No way have plants here
Arrived at a settlement.
Not the mare’s tail,
Not the broom or whins.
It must have to do
With the wind.
*
Not that the grass itself
Ever rests in peace.
It too takes issue,
Now sets its face
To the wind,
Now turns its back.
*
‘See me?’ it says,
Has me well rehearsed
In the ways of the world.
Unstable is good.
&nbs
p; Permission granted!
Go then, citizen
Of the wind.
Go with the flow.’
*
The bracken
Is less boastful.
It closes and curls back
On its secrets,
The best kept
Upon earth.
*
And, to be fair,
There is sun as well.
Nowhere else
Is there sun like here,
Morning sunshine
All day long.
Which is why the plants,
Even the bracken,
Are sometimes tempted
Into trust.
*
On sunlit tarmac,
On memories of the hearse
At walking pace
Between overgrown verges,
The dead here are borne
Towards the future.
*
When the funeral bell tolls
The grass is all a-tremble.
But only then.
Not every time any old bell
Rings.
*
Broom
Is like the disregarded
And company for them,
Shows them
They have to keep going,
That the whole thing’s worth
The effort.
And sometimes
Like those same characters
When the weather’s very good
Broom sings.
*
Never, in later days,
Would fruit
So taste of earth.
There was slate
In the blackberries,
A slatey sap.
*
Run your hand into
The ditchback growth
And you’d grope roots,
Thick and thin.
But roots of what?
Once, one that we saw
Gave itself away,
The tail of a rat
We killed.
*
We had enemies,
Though why we never knew.
Among them,
Nettles,
Malignant things, letting on
To be asleep.
*
Enemies –
Part of a world
Nobody seemed able to explain
But that had to be
Put up with.
There would always be dock leaves
To cure the vicious stings.
*
There were leaves on the trees
And growth on the headrigs
You could confess
Everything to.
Even your fears
Of the night,
Of people
Even.
*
What was better then
Than to crush a leaf or a herb
Between your palms,
Then wave it slowly, soothingly
Past your mouth and nose
And breathe?
*
If you know a bit
About the universe
It’s because you’ve taken it in
Like that,
Looked as hard
As you look into yourself,
Into the rat hole,
Through the vetch and dock
That mantled it.
Because you’ve laid your cheek
Against the rush clump
And known soft stone to break
On the quarry floor.
*
Between heather and marigold,
Between sphagnum and buttercup,
Between dandelion and broom,
Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle,
As between clear blue and cloud,
Between haystack and sunset sky,
Between oak tree and slated roof,
I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.
*
Where can it be found again,
An elsewhere world, beyond
Maps and atlases,
Where all is woven into
And of itself, like a nest
Of crosshatched grass blades?
Canopy
It was the month of May.
Trees in Harvard Yard
Were turning a young green.
There was whispering everywhere.
David Ward had installed
Voice-boxes in the branches,
Speakers wrapped in sacking
Looking like old wasps’ nests
Or bat-fruit in the gloaming –
Shadow Adam’s apples
That made sibilant ebb and flow,
Speech-gutterings, desultory
Hush and backwash and echo.
It was like a recording
Of antiphonal responses
In the congregation of leaves.
Or a wood that talked in its sleep.
Reeds on a riverbank
Going over and over their secret.
People were cocking their ears,
Gathering, quietening,
Stepping on to the grass,
Stopping and holding hands.
Earth was replaying its tapes,
Words being given new airs:
Dante’s whispering wood –
The wood of the suicides –
Had been magicked to lover’s lane.
If a twig had been broken off there
It would have curled itself like a finger
Around the fingers that broke it
And then refused to let go
As if it were mistletoe
Taking tightening hold.
Or so I thought as the fairy
Lights in the boughs came on.
1994
The Riverbank Field
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.’
after Aeneid VI, 704–15, 748–51
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
Smelling of dry rot and disinfectant
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 rab
bit cages,
Melodious with canaries, green and gold,
But silent now as birdless Lake Avernus.
I hurried on, shortcutting to the buses,