District and Circle Read online

  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)

  Was in hammered iron.

  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.

  “Here,” he says,

  “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.