When dawn was a soundless birth and sunset mimed
the idea of loss, the whooper happened in
with the vowel to suit October in these parts,
a tone that made somehow bearable the wind’s
insistent dismissals, its miserly null-and-void.
Though earthbound, land-locked, I never lacked till now
the gift of a coastal childhood, or missed a life
edged with Atlantic: sea-self, sky-self, land-self
among the dunes in late autumn, balance restored
by the rich plaint, the vibrant ochone of the whooper swan.
CIARAN CARSON
(b.1948)
Dresden
Horse Boyle was called Horse Boyle because of his brother Mule;
Though why Mule was called Mule is anybody’s guess. I stayed there once,
Or rather, I nearly stayed there once. But that’s another story.
At any rate they lived in this decrepit caravan, not two miles out of Carrick,
Encroached upon by baroque pyramids of empty baked bean tins, rusts
And ochres, hints of autumn merging into twilight. Horse believed
They were as good as a watchdog, and to tell you the truth
You couldn’t go near the place without something falling over:
A minor avalanche would ensue – more like a shop bell, really,
The old-fashioned ones on string, connected to the latch, I think,
And as you entered in, the bell would tinkle in the empty shop, a musk
Of soap and turf and sweets would hit you from the gloom. Tobacco.
Baling wire. Twine. And, of course, shelves and pyramids of tins.
An old woman would appear from the back – there was a sizzling pan in there,
Somewhere, a whiff of eggs and bacon – and ask you what you wanted;
Or rather, she wouldn’t ask; she would talk about the weather. It had rained
That day, but it was looking better. They had just put in the spuds.
I had only come to pass the time of day, so I bought a token packet of Gold Leaf.
All this time the fry was frying away. Maybe she’d a daughter in there
Somewhere, though I hadn’t heard the neighbours talk of it; if anybody knew,
It would be Horse. Horse kept his ears to the ground.
And he was a great man for current affairs; he owned the only TV in the place.
Come dusk he’d set off on his rounds, to tell the whole townland the latest
Situation in the Middle East, a mortar bomb attack in Mullaghbawn –
The damn things never worked, of course – and so he’d tell the story
How in his young day it was very different. Take young Flynn, for instance,
Who was ordered to take this bus and smuggle some sticks of gelignite
Across the border, into Derry, when the RUC – or was it the RIC? –
Got wind of it. The bus was stopped, the peeler stepped on. Young Flynn
Took it like a man, of course: he owned up right away. He opened the bag
And produced the bomb, his rank and serial number. For all the world
Like a pound of sausages. Of course, the thing was, the peeler’s bike
Had got a puncture, and he didn’t know young Flynn from Adam. All he wanted
Was to get home for his tea. Flynn was in for seven years and learned to speak
The best of Irish. He had thirteen words for a cow in heat;
A word for the third thwart in a boat, the wake of a boat on the ebb tide.
He knew the extinct names of insects, flowers, why this place was called
Whatever: Carrick, for example, was a rock. He was damn right there –
As the man said, When you buy meat you buy bones, when you buy land you buy stones.
You’d be hard put to find a square foot in the whole bloody parish
That wasn’t thick with flints and pebbles. To this day he could hear the grate
And scrape as the spade struck home, for it reminded him of broken bones:
Digging a graveyard, maybe – or better still, trying to dig a reclaimed tip
Of broken delft and crockery ware – you know that sound that sets your teeth on edge
When the chalk squeaks on the blackboard, or you shovel ashes from the stove?
Master McGinty – he’d be on about McGinty then, and discipline, the capitals
Of South America, Moore’s Melodies, the Battle of Clontarf, and
Tell me this, an educated man like you: What goes on four legs when it’s young,
Two legs when it’s grown up, and three legs when it’s old? I’d pretend
I didn’t know. McGinty’s leather strap would come up then, stuffed
With threepenny bits to give it weight and sting. Of course, it never did him
Any harm: You could take a horse to water but you couldn’t make him drink.
He himself was nearly going on to be a priest.
And many’s the young cub left the school as wise as when he came.
Carrowkeel was where McGinty came from – Narrow Quarter, Flynn explained –
Back before the Troubles, a place that was so mean and crabbed,
Horse would have it, men were known to eat their dinner from a drawer.
Which they’d slide shut the minute you’d walk in.
He’d demonstrate this at the kitchen table, hunched and furtive, squinting
Out the window – past the teetering minarets of rust, down the hedge-dark aisle –
To where a stranger might appear, a passer-by, or what was maybe worse,
Someone he knew. Someone who wanted something. Someone who was hungry.
Of course who should come tottering up the lane that instant but his brother
Mule. I forgot to mention they were twins. They were as like two –
No, not peas in a pod, for this is not the time nor the place to go into
Comparisons, and this is really Horse’s story, Horse who – now I’m getting
Round to it – flew over Dresden in the war. He’d emigrated first, to
Manchester. Something to do with scrap – redundant mill machinery,
Giant flywheels, broken looms that would, eventually, be ships, or aeroplanes.
He said he wore his fingers to the bone.
And so, on impulse, he had joined the RAF. He became a rear gunner.
Of all the missions, Dresden broke his heart. It reminded him of china.
As he remembered it, long afterwards, he could hear, or almost hear
Between the rapid desultory thunderclaps, a thousand tinkling echoes –
All across the map of Dresden, storerooms full of china shivered, teetered
And collapsed, an avalanche of porcelain, slushing and cascading: cherubs,
Shepherdesses, figurines of Hope and Peace and Victory, delicate bone fragments.
He recalled in particular a figure from his childhood, a milkmaid
Standing on the mantelpiece. Each night as they knelt down for the Rosary,
His eyes would wander up to where she seemed to beckon to him, smiling,
Offering him, eternally, her pitcher of milk, her mouth of rose and cream.
One day, reaching up to hold her yet again, his fingers stumbled, and she fell.
He lifted down a biscuit tin, and opened it.
It breathed an antique incense: things like pencils, snuff, tobacco.
His war medals. A broken rosary. And there, the milkmaid’s creamy hand, the outstretched
Pitcher of milk, all that survived. Outside, there was a scraping
And a tittering; I knew Mule’s step by now, his careful drunken weaving
Through the tin-stacks. I might have stayed the night, but there’s no time
To go back to that now; I could hardly, at any rate, pick up the thread.
I wandered out through the steeples of rust, the gate that was a broken bed.
A Date Called Eat Me
The American Fruit Company had genetically engineered a new variety of designer apple,
Nameless as yet, which explored the various Platonic ideals of the ‘apple’ synapse.
Outside the greengrocer’s lighted awning it is dusky Hallowe’en. It is
Snowing on a box of green apples, crinkly falling on the tissue paper. It is
Melting on the green, unbitten, glistening apples, attracted by their gravity.
I yawned my teeth and bit into the dark, mnemonic cavity.
That apple-box was my first book-case. I covered it in woodgrain Fablon –
You know that Sixties stick-on plastic stuff? I thought it looked dead-on:
Blue Pelicans and orange Penguins, The Pocket Oxford English Dictionary;
Holmes and Poe, The Universe, the fading aura of an apple named Discovery –
I tried to extricate its itsy-bitsy tick of rind between one tooth and another tooth,
The way you try to winkle out the ‘facts’ between one truth and another truth.
Try to imagine the apple talking to you, tempting you like something out of Aesop,
Clenched about its navel like a fist or face, all pith and pips and sap
Or millions of them, hailing from the heavens, going pom, pom, pom, pom, pom
On the roof of the American Fruit Company, whose computer banks are going ohm and om.
They were trying to get down to the nitty-gritty, sixty-four-thousand dollar question of whether the stalk
Is apple or branch or what. The programme was stuck.
The juice of it explodes against the roof and tongue, the cheek of it.
I lied about the Fablon, by the way. It was really midnight black with stars on it.
from The Twelfth of Never
The Rising Sun
As I was driven into smoky Tokyo
The yen declined again. It had been going down
All day against the buoyant Hibernian Pound.
Black rain descended like a harp arpeggio.
The Professor took me to a bonsai garden
To imbibe some thimblefuls of Japanese poteen.
We wandered through the forest of the books of Arden.
The number of their syllables was seventeen.
I met a maiden of Hiroshima who played
The hammer dulcimer like psychedelic rain.
The rising sun was hid behind a cloud of jade.
She sang to me of Fujiyama and of Zen,
Of yin and yang, and politics, and crack cocaine,
And Plato’s caverns, which are measureless to men.
from Breaking News
Trap
backpack radio
antenna
twitching
rifle
headphones
cocked
I don’t
read you
what the
over
Wake
near dawn
boom
the window
trembled
bomb
I thought
then in
the lull
a blackbird
whistled in
a chink
of light
between
that world
and this
from For All We Know
from Part One: The Fetch
To see one’s own doppelgänger is an omen of death.
The doppelgänger casts no reflection in a mirror.
Shelley saw himself swimming towards himself before he drowned.
Lincoln met his fetch at the stage door before he was shot.
It puts me in mind of prisoners interrogated,
of one telling his story so well he could see himself
performing in it, speaking the very words he spoke now,
seeing the face of the accomplice he had invented.
When all is said and done there is nothing more to be said.
No need for handcuffs, or any other restraint. They take
a swab of his sweat from the vinyl chair in which he sat.
Should he ever escape his prison the dogs shall be loosed.
Your death stands always in the background, but don’t be afraid.
For he will only come to fetch you when your time has come.
from Part Two: The Fetch
I woke. You were lying beside me in the double bed,
prone, your long dark hair fanned out over the downy pillow.
I’d been dreaming we stood on a beach an ocean away
watching the waves purl into their troughs and tumble over.
Knit one, purl two, you said. Something in your voice made me think
of women knitting by the guillotine. Your eyes met mine.
The fetch of a wave is the distance it travels, you said,
from where it is born at sea to where it founders to shore.
I must go back to where it all began. You waded in
thigh-deep, waist-deep, breast-deep, head-deep, until you disappeared.
I lay there and thought how glad I was to find you again.
You stirred in the bed and moaned something. I heard a footfall
on the landing, the rasp of a man’s cough. He put his head
around the door. He had my face. I woke. You were not there.
TOM PAULIN
(b.1949)
A Written Answer
This poem by Rupert Brookeborough
is all about fishing and the stout B-men
(they live for always in our hearts,
their only crime was being loyal),
there is a lough in it and stacks of rivers,
also a brave wee hymn to the sten-gun.
The poet describes Gough of the Curragh
and by his use of many metric arts
he designs a fictionary universe
which has its own laws and isn’t quite
the same as this place that we call real.
His use of metonymy is pretty desperate
and the green symbolism’s a contradiction,
but I like his image of the elm and chestnut,
for to me this author is a fly man
and the critics yonder say his work is alright.
The Road to Inver (Pessoa)
for Xon de Ros and Jamie McKendrick
I left a village called Tempo
oh maybe an hour back
and now I’m driving to Inver
in an old beatup gunked Toyota
I’ve borrowed from a mate in Belfast
(there was a poet down south
who blessed all the new Toyotas in Ireland
– everyone else was driving in circles
but he came out with a firm line
and drove it straight home)
cold as a hub cap
there’s a full moon shining
over the pine plantation
that belongs here really
no more than I do
though man and boy I’ve watched it grow
from naked wee saplings
to mature slightly sinister trees
just as I’ve watched them bed
two salmon farms and an oyster
farm out there in the bay
(if it was daylight I’d point to
a spot on the ocean that’s corrugated
and rusted like scrap metal or
– same thing – a tank trap at high tide)
but it looks like I’m on another journey
in another time
where I go on – go on and on –
without ever having left Belfast
or having to go to Inver
– in Irish it means river
mouth – which is a bit like not having read
– I don’t know the language –
like not having read
that book – is it a novel or memoir? –
called The House at Inver
which stood somewhere on the
shelves
in our house in Belfast
which reminds me my grandmother’s house
in Belfast was called Invergowrie
after the village in the Lowlands she was born in
or maybe that her family came from
(they brought the bronze nameplate with them when they moved from Glasgow
and settled – more or less – in Ireland)
I’m going to spend the night in Inver
– check in to some B&B
because I can’t stay in Belfast
but when I get to Inver
I’ll be sorry
I didn’t stay behind in Belfast
– always this disquiet – I’m anxious
– anxious to no purpose –
always always always
and always too much – over the top –
and all for nothing
on the road to Inver
it’s a dream road this
the same road that leads
to the Elver Inn on Lough Neagh
– ’s just a phrase dream road
like the rood of time
or the long road to nowhere
or big fat pursy toad
the wheel of my borrowed car
is taut like a fishing line
or like reins
and the wheels they go smoothly
over the tired the humpy
old road
that feels a bit like a bog road
– I smile at this symbol as I recall it
and make a right turn
– how many borrowed things do
I go about in or use all day?
but the things that are lent I take
them over and make them mine
– one day way back they even loaned me me
– I’d stake my life on that
though the idea cuts me like a knife
(I feel like – well
a double agent who might be triple)
there’s a mobile home by the roadside
– one with no wheels I often used dream of
when my heart and my spirit they
felt cut to pieces as I worried
what would happen my children
– the headlights catch its fence
that’s new gardencentre wattle
an open field and the moon
making it cold like bare metal
for the car in which – leaving Tempo –
I felt like a freedom rider
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 69