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
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.
Death of a Painter
i.m. Nancy Wynne Jones
Not a tent of blue but a peek of gold
From her coign of vantage in the studio,
A Wicklow cornfield in the gable window.
Long gazing at the hill – but not Cézanne,
More Thomas Hardy working to the end
In his crocheted old heirloom of a shawl.
And now not Hardy but a butterfly,
One of the multitude he imagined airborne
Through Casterbridge, down the summer thoroughfare.
And now not a butterfly but Jonah entering
The whale’s mouth, as the Old English says,
Like a mote through a minster door.
Loughanure
i.m. Colin Middleton
I
Smoke might have been already in his eyes
The way he’d narrow them to size you up
As if you were a canvas, all the while
Licking and sealing a hand-rolled cigarette,
Each small ash increment flicked off
As white as flecks on the horizon line
Of his painting of Loughanure, thirty guineas
Forty-odd years ago. Whitewashed gables
Like petals stripped from hawthorn, heather ground
A pother of Gaeltacht turf smoke. Every time
He came to the house, he would go and stand
Gazing at it, grunting a bit and nodding.
II
So this is what an afterlife can come to?
A cloud-boil of grey weather on the wall
Like murky crystal, a remembered stare –
This for an answer to Alighieri
And Plato’s Er? Who watched immortal souls
Choose lives to come according as they were
Fulfilled or repelled by existences they’d known
Or suffered first time round. Saw great far-seeing
Odysseus in the end choose for himself
The destiny of a private man. Saw Orpheus
Because he’d perished at the women’s hands
Choose rebirth as a swan.
III
And did I seek the Kingdom? Will the Kingdom
Come? The idea of it there,
Behind its scrim since font and fontanel,
Breaks like light or water,
Like giddiness I felt at the old story
Of how he’d turn away from the motif,
Spread his legs, bend low, then look between them
For the mystery of the hard and fast
To be unveiled, his inverted face contorting
Like an arse-kisser’s in some vision of the damned
Until he’d straighten, turn back, cock an eye
And stand with the brush at arm’s length, readying.
IV
Had I had sufficient Irish in Rannafast
In 1953 to understand
The seanchas and dinnsheanchas,
Had not been too young and too shy,
Had even heard the story about Caoilte
Hunting the fawn from Tory to a door
In a fairy hill where he wasn’t turned away
But led to a crystal chair on the hill floor
While a girl with golden ringlets harped and sang,
Language and longing might have made a leap
Up through that cloud-swabbed air, the horizon lightened
And the far ‘Lake of the Yew Tree’ gleamed.
V
Not all that far, as it turns out,
Now that I can cover those few miles
In almost as few minutes, Mount Errigal
On the skyline the one constant thing
As I drive unhomesick, unbelieving, through
A grant-aided, renovated scene, trying
To remember the Greek word signifying
A world restored completely: that would include
Hannah Mhór’s turkey-chortle of Irish,
The swan at evening over Loch an Iubhair,
Clarnico Murray’s hard iced caramels
A penny an ounce over Sharkey’s counter.
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,
Between languages, half in thrall to desire,
Half shy of it, when a flit of the foreknown
Blinked off a sunlit lake near the horizon
And passed into us, climbing and clunking up
Those fretted metal steps, as we reboarded
And were reincarnated seat by seat.
III White Nights
Furrow-plodders in spats and bright clasped brogues
Are cradling bags and hoisting beribboned drones
As their skilled neck-pullers’ fingers force the chanters
And the whole band starts rehearsing
Its stupendous, swaggering march
Inside the hall. Meanwhile
One twilit field and summer hedge away
We wait for the learner who will stay behind
Piping by stops and starts,
Making an injured music for us alone,
Early-to-beds, white-night absentees
Open-eared to this day.
Sweeney Out-Takes
for Gregory of Corkus
I Otterboy
‘Eorann writes with news of our two otters
Courting yesterday morning by the turnhole.
I can see them at their shiny romps
And imagine myself an otterboy
Kneeling where Ronan stands in cleric’s vestment,
His hand outstretched to turn the bordered page
Of a massbook I hold high for his perusal,
My brow inclined to those big thong-tied feet
Protruding from the alb. Then shake myself
Like a waterdog that bounds out on the bank
To drop whatever he’s retrieved and gambol
In pelt-sluice and unruly riverbreath.’
II He Remembers Lynchechaun
‘That three-leggèd, round-bellied, cast-iron pot
Deep in the nettle clump, cobweb-mouthed
And black-frost cold
After its cauldron life of plump and boil,
Reminds me of the cool consideration
Behind the busy warmth
Of Lynchechaun; and its heaviness
When I’d lift it off the crane,
Its lightening once I’d tilt and drain it
I now see as premonitions
Of my seeing through him, the dizziness
As scales fell from my eyes.’
III The Pattern
‘Full face, foursquare, eyelevel, carved in stone,
An ecclesiastic on the low-set lintel
Vested and unavoidable as the one
I approached head-on the full length of an aisle –
Unready as I was if much rehearsed
In the art of first confession.
What transpired next was meltwater,
A little trickle on the patterned tiles,
Truthfunk and walkaway, but then
In the nick of time, heelturn, comeback
And a clean breast made
Manfully if late. The pattern set.’
Colum Cille Cecinit
I Is scíth mo chrob ón scríbainn
My hand is cramped from penwork.
My quill has a tapered point.
Its bird-mouth issues a blue-dark
Beetle-sparkle of ink.
Wisdom keeps welling in streams
From my fine-drawn sallow hand:
Riverrun on the vellum
Of ink from green-skinned holly.
My small runny pen keeps going
Through books, through thick and thin,
To enrich the scholars’ holdings –
Penwork that cramps my hand.
II Is aire charaim Doire
Derry I cherish ever.
It is calm, it is clear.
Crowds of white angels on their rounds
At every corner.
III Fil súil nglais
Towards Ireland a grey eye
Will look back but not see
Ever again
The men of Ireland or her women.
11th–12th CENTURY
Hermit Songs
for Helen Vendler
Above the ruled quires of my book
I hear the wild birds jubilant.
I
With cut-offs of black calico,
Remnants of old blackout blinds
Ironed, tacked with criss-cross threads,
We jacketed the issued books.