The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry

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The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 71

by Patrick Crotty (ed)


  I imagined him sitting outside a hacienda

  Somewhere in the Argentine.

  He would peer for hours

  Into the vastness of the pampas.

  Or he might be pointing out the constellations

  Of the Southern hemisphere

  To the open-mouthed child at his elbow.

  He sleeps with a loaded pistol under his pillow.

  The mile-long white Cadillac had now wrapped

  Itself round the Park Hotel.

  We were spirited to the nineteenth floor

  Where Caulfield located a secret door.

  We climbed two perilous flights of steps

  To the exclusive penthouse suite.

  A moment later I was ushered

  Into a chamber sealed with black drapes.

  As I grew accustomed to the gloom

  I realized there was someone else in the room.

  He was huddled on an old orthopaedic mattress,

  The makings of a skeleton,

  Naked but for a pair of draw-string shorts.

  His hair was waistlength, as was his beard.

  He was covered in bedsores.

  He raised one talon.

  ‘I forgive you,’ he croaked. ‘And I forget.

  On your way out, you tell that bastard

  To bring me a dish of ice-cream.

  I want Baskin-Robbins banana-nut ice-cream.’

  I shimmied about the cavernous lobby.

  Mr and Mrs Alfred Tennyson

  Were ahead of me through the revolving door.

  She tipped the bell-hop five dollars.

  There was a steady stream of people

  That flowed in one direction,

  Faster and deeper,

  That I would go along with, happily,

  As I made my way back, like any other pilgrim,

  To Main Street, to Foster’s pool-room.

  Aisling

  I was making my way home late one night

  this summer, when I staggered

  into a snow drift.

  Her eyes spoke of a sloe-year,

  her mouth a year of haws.

  Was she Aurora, or the goddess Flora,

  Artemidora, or Venus bright,

  or Anorexia, who left

  a lemon stain on my flannel sheet?

  It’s all much of a muchness.

  In Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital

  a kidney machine

  supports the latest hunger-striker

  to have called off his fast, a saline

  drip into his bag of brine.

  A lick and a promise. Cuckoo spittle.

  I hand my sample to Doctor Maw.

  She gives me back a confident All Clear.

  They that Wash on Thursday

  She was such a dab hand, my mother. Such a dab hand

  at raising her hand

  to a child. At bringing a cane down across my hand

  in such a seemingly offhand

  manner I almost have to hand

  it to her. ‘Many hands,’

  she would say, ‘spoil the broth.’ My father took no hand

  in this. He washed his hands

  of the matter. He sat on his hands.

  So I learned firsthand

  to deal in the off-, the under-, the sleight-of-hand,

  writing now in that great, open hand

  yet never quite showing my hand.

  I poured myself a drink with a heavy hand.

  As for the women with whom I sat hand-in-hand

  in the Four-in-Hand,

  as soon as they were eating out of my hand

  I dismissed them out of hand.

  Then one would play into my hands –

  or did she force my hand? –

  whose lily-white hand

  I took in marriage. I should have known beforehand

  it wouldn’t work. ‘When will you ever take yourself in hand?’

  ‘And give you the upper hand?’

  For things were by now completely out of hand.

  The show of hands

  on a moonlit hill under the Red Hand.

  The Armalite in one hand

  and the ballot box in the other. Men dying at hand.

  Throughout all of which I would hand

  back to continuity as the second hand

  came up to noon. ‘On the one hand …

  On the other …’ The much-vaunted even hand

  of the BBC. Though they’d pretty much given me a free hand

  I decided at length to throw in my hand

  and tendered my resignation ‘by hand’.

  I was now quite reconciled to living from hand

  to mouth. (Give that man a big, big hand.)

  My father was gone. My mother long gone. Into Thy hands,

  O Lord … Gone, too, the ink-stained hands

  of Mary Powers. Now I’d taken another lily-white hand

  put in by the hole of the door. A hand

  no bigger than a cloud. Now she and I and the child of my right hand

  stand hand in hand,

  brave Americans all, and I know (‘The bird in the hand

  is the early bird …’) that the time is at hand

  for me to set my hand

  to my daughter’s still-wet, freehand

  version of the Muldoon ‘coat of arms’ that came to hand

  in a heraldry shop on Nassau Street – on a green field a white hand.

  Third Epistle to Timothy

  You made some mistake when you intended to favor me with some of the new valuable grass seed … for what you gave me … proves mere timothy.

  —A letter from Benjamin Franklin to Jared Eliot, July 16, 1747

  I

  Midnight. June 1923. Not a stir except for the brough and brouhaha

  surrounding the taper or link

  in which a louse

  flares up and a shadow, my da’s,

  clatters against a wall of the six-by-eight-by-six-foot room

  he sleeps in, eleven years old, a servant boy at Hardys of Carnteel.

  There’s a boot-polish lid filled with turps

  or paraffin oil

  under each cast-iron bed leg, a little barrier

  against bedbugs under each bed foot.

  II

  That knocking’s the knocking against their stalls of a team

  of six black Clydesdales mined in Coalisland

  he’s only just helped to unhitch from the cumbersome

  star of a hay rake. Decently and in order

  he brought each whitewashed nose

  to its nosebag of corn, to its galvanized bucket.

  One of the six black Clydesdale mares

  he helped all day to hitch and unhitch

  was showing, on the near hock, what might be a bud of farcy

  picked up, no doubt, while on loan to Wesley Cummins.

  III

  ‘Decently and in order,’ Cummins would proclaim, ‘let all Inniskillings

  be done.’ A week ago my da helped him limber up

  the team to a mowing machine as if to a gun carriage. ‘For no Dragoon

  can function without his measure of char.’

  He patted his bellyband. ‘A measure, that is, against dysentery.’

  This was my da’s signal to rush

  into the deep shade of the hedge to fetch such little tea as might remain

  in the tea urn. ‘Man does not live,’ Cummins would snort, ‘only by scraps

  of wheaten farls and tea dregs.

  You watch your step or I’ll see you’re shipped back to Killeter.’

  IV

  ‘ Killeeshill,’ my da says, ‘I’m from Killeeshill.’ Along the cast-iron

  rainbow of his bed end

  comes a line

  of chafers or cheeselips that have scaled the bed legs

  despite the boot-polish lids. Eleven years of age. A servant boy

  on the point of falling asleep. The reek of paraffin />
  or the pinewoods reek

  of turpentine

  good against roundworm in horses. That knocking against their stalls

  of six Clydesdales, each standing at sixteen hands.

  V

  Building hay even now, even now drawing level with the team’s headbrass,

  buoyed up by nothing more than the ballast

  of hay – meadow cat’s-tail, lucerne, the leaf upon trodden leaf

  of white clover and red –

  drawing level now with the taper blooms of a horse chestnut.

  Already light in the head.

  ‘Though you speak, young Muldoon …’ Cummins calls up from trimming the skirt

  of the haycock, ‘though you speak with the tongue

  of an angel, I see you for what you are … Malevolent.

  Not only a member of the church malignant but a malevolent spirit.’

  VI

  Even now borne aloft by bearing down on lap cocks and shake cocks

  from under one of which a ruddy face

  suddenly twists and turns upward as if itself carried

  on a pitchfork and, meeting its gaze

  he sees himself, a servant boy still, still ten or eleven,

  breathing upon a Clydesdale’s near hock and finding a farcy bud

  like a tiny glow in a strut of charcoal.

  ‘I see you,’ Cummins points at him with the pitchfork, ‘you little byblow,

  I see you casting your spells, your sorceries,

  I see you coming as a thief in the night to stab us in the back.’

  VII

  A year since they kidnapped Anketell Moutray from his home at Favour Royal,

  dragging him, blindfolded, the length of his own gravel path,

  eighty years old, the Orange County grand master. Four A Specials shot on a train

  in Clones. The Clogher valley

  a blaze of flax mills and haysheds. Memories of the Land League. Davitt and Biggar.

  Breaking the boycott at Lough Mask.

  The Land Leaguers beaten

  at the second battle of Saintfield. It shall be revealed …

  A year since they cut out the clapper of a collabor … a collabor …

  a collaborator from Maguiresbridge.

  VIII

  That knocking’s the team’s near-distant knocking on wood

  while my da breathes upon

  the blue-yellow flame on a fetlock, on a deep-feathered pastern

  of one of six black Shires … ‘Because it shall be revealed by fire,’

  Cummins’s last pitchfork is laden

  with thistles, ‘as the sparks fly upward

  man is born into trouble. For the tongue may yet be cut

  from an angel.’ The line of cheeselips and chafers

  along the bed end. ‘Just wait till you come back down and I get a hold

  of you, young Muldoon … We’ll see what spells you’ll cast.’

  IX

  For an instant it seems no one else might scale

  such a parapet of meadow cat’s-tail, lucerne, red and white clovers,

  not even the line of chafers and cheeselips

  that overthrow as they undermine

  when, light in the head, unsteady on his pegs as Anketell Moutray,

  he squints through a blindfold of clegs

  from his grass-capped, thistle-strewn vantage point,

  the point where two hay ropes cross,

  where Cummins and his crew have left him, in a straw hat with a fraying brim,

  while they’ve moved on to mark out the next haycock.

  X

  That next haycock already summoning itself from windrow after wind-weary windrow

  while yet another brings itself to mind in the acrid stink

  of turpentine. There the image of Lizzie,

  Hardy’s last servant girl, reaches out from her dais

  of salt hay, stretches out an unsunburned arm

  half in bestowal, half beseechingly, then turns away to appeal

  to all that spirit troop

  of hay treaders as far as the eye can see, the coil on coil

  of hay from which, in the taper’s mild uproar,

  they float out across the dark face of the earth, an earth without form, and void.

  The Breather

  Think of this gravestone

  as a long, low chair

  strategically placed

  at a turn in the stair.

  Turkey Buzzards

  They’ve been so long above it all,

  those two petals

  so steeped in style they seem to stall

  in the kettle

  simmering over the town dump

  or, better still,

  the neon-flashed, X-rated rump

  of fresh roadkill

  courtesy of the interstate

  that Eisenhower

  would overtake in the home straight

  by one horsepower,

  the kettle where it all boils down

  to the thick scent

  of death, a scent of such renown

  it’s given vent

  to the idea buzzards can spot

  a deer carcass

  a mile away, smelling the rot

  as, once, Marcus

  Aurelius wrinkled his nose

  at a gas leak

  from the Great Sewer that ran through Rome

  to the Tiber

  then went searching out, through the gloam,

  one subscriber

  to the other view that the rose,

  full-blown, antique,

  its no-frills ruff, the six-foot shrug

  of its swing-wings,

  the theologian’s and the thug’s

  twin triumphings

  in a buzzard’s shaved head and snood,

  buzz-buzz-buzzy,

  its logic in all likelihood

  somewhat fuzzy,

  would ever come into focus,

  it ever deign

  to dispense its hocus-pocus

  in that same vein

  as runs along an inner thigh

  to where, too right,

  the buzzard vouchsafes not to shy

  away from shite,

  its mission not to give a miss

  to a bête noire,

  all roly-poly, full of piss

  and vinegar,

  trying rather to get to grips

  with the grommet

  of the gut, setting its tinsnips

  to that grommet

  in the spray-painted hind’s hindgut

  and making a

  sweeping, too right, a sweeping cut

  that’s so blasé

  it’s hard to imagine, dear Sis,

  why others shrink

  from this sight of a soul in bliss,

  so in the pink

  from another month in the red

  of the shambles,

  like a rose in over its head

  among brambles,

  unflappable in its belief

  it’s Ararat

  on which the Ark would come to grief,

  abjuring that

  Marcus Aurelius humbug

  about what springs

  from earth succumbing to the tug

  at its heartstrings,

  reported to live past fifty,

  as you yet may,

  dear Sis, perhaps growing your hair

  in requital,

  though briefly, of whatever tears

  at your vitals,

  learning, perhaps, from the nifty,

  nay thrifty, way

  these buzzards are given to stoop

  and take their ease

  by letting their time-chastened poop

  fall to their knees

  till they’re almost as bright with lime

  as their night roost,

  their poop containing an enzyme

  that’s known to boost

  their immune systems, should they
prong

  themselves on small

  bones in a cerebral cortex,

  at no small cost

  to their well-being, sinking fast

  in a deer crypt,

  buzzards getting the hang at last

  of being stripped

  of their command of the vortex

  while having lost

  their common touch, they’ve been so long

  above it all.

  KERRY HARDIE

  (b.1951)

  Ship of Death

  for my mother

  Watching you, for the first time,

  turn to prepare your boat, my mother;

  making it clear you have other business now –

  the business of your future –

  I was washed-through with anger.

  It was a first survey,

  an eye thrown

  over sails, oars, timbers,

  as many a time I’d seen that practised eye

  scan a laden table.

  How can you plan going off like this

  when we stand at last, close enough, if the wind is right,

  to hear what the other is saying?

  I never thought you’d do this, turning away,

  mid-sentence, your hand testing a rope,

  your ear tuned

  to the small thunder of the curling wave

  on the edge of the great-night sea,

  neither regretful nor afraid –

  anxious only for the tide.

  Seal Morning

  The small seal, laid on the greyish sand

  like a bolster – the same off-white colour –

  its smooth, tight, belly-ticking holed by a crow,

  one thick thread of blackened entrail

  pulled out and looped loosely over its body.

  And the crow – standing off – waiting.

  Like those old stories of the Vikings,

  how they’d prick a man’s belly and hook out

  a coil of his gut. Then they’d nail it to a tree

  and make him crawl round and around,

  unwinding himself, the tree taking his entrails,

  as a bobbin draws thread from a spool.

  The sea mist was a blowing whiteness,

  the small seal lay on its back in a curve,

  one flipper folded across its body,

  the other outstretched. Like a sunbather

  lying in easy abandon, asleep. Too private really;

 

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