Visiting the Corsetmaker

 It was ireland in the sixties. Corset conversation veered very close to immodesty. Michael O'Hehir was the voice of Sunday afternoons in Summer, and a spin in the car seemed like a good idea, but children get bored quickly.

 VISITING THE CORSETMAKER

Miss Gately, you know, the corsetmaker; her cottage 

thatched and whitewashed beneath sycamores ragged with 

crows and their bickering. A Sunday afternoon, my mother 

walking to the red door and it opened and closed and 

nothing else stirring for ages but ourselves in the back of the 

white consul with the red roof at the end of the avenue, just 

outside the gate; stone walls and lichen patches wallpapering 

our afternoon. Father dropping off in the driver’s seat 

while Micheal O'Hehir commentated on matches, one after 

another, without ever taking a breath in all that pipe smoke; matches collecting in the ash-tray all burnt to tiny black bird 

bones and the condensation all used up with words and 

faces dribbling pathetically into shapeless bad temper. Over 

and over: will she ever come out, can’t we go now, why do 

we always have to come, move your legs; till eventually she 

would reappear, a slap in the doorway, motor jauntily, 

red-headed, back to the car like it’s been five minutes or 

something, and Dad’s awake, reversing from the gate, back 

into the remains of a Sunday afternoon.

And I never knew what went on in there; never saw who 

opened the door, never saw a package, never heard anything 

about it. My father didn’t know either. I remember she 

took my sister with her when my sister was in secondary 

school. I wouldn’t have wanted to join them anyway, it was obviously a woman’s house.

Breathing

Now my father's life

is breathing.

Heavy work. 

He has already slipped away

to be alone

while we outside

mark every breath

like lap timers.

 

Now come the spaces:

a breath

is an isolated thing. 

Finally one breath

arrives alone. 

I feel a soul has left,

 

but just then

I see, so clearly,

it was hope

that slipped out of the room.

 

(from Sunfire)

Country Childhood

There is no doubt that my Roscommon childhood has been idealised in this poem, but yet, I honestly believe that I had a very privileged upbringing. It was a good time in a safe place among great people. Behind our house countryside stretched off into the unknown; we had complete freedom to disappear for hours on end into that vastness.For any child with a lively imagination, that was  freedom of the universe.

From the front we saw Roscommon town across three fields. From front to back contained all the world I needed, and I was happy in it.

       The Country Child.

The country child

runs in and out of rain showers

like rooms;

sees the snake-patterns in trains,

the sun's sword-play in the hedges

and the confetti in falling elder blossoms;

knows the humming in the telegraph poles

as the hedgerow's voice

when tar bubbles are ripe for bursting;

watches bees emerge from the caverns

at the centres of buttercups,

feels no end to a daisy chain,

feels no end to an afternoon;

walks on ice though it creaks;

sees fish among ripples and names them;

is conversant with berries

and hides behind thorns;

slips down leaves, behind stones;

fills his hands with the stream

and his hair with the smell of hay;

recognizes the chalkiness

of the weathered bones of sheep,

the humour in a rusted fence,

the feel of the white beards that hang there.

The country child

sees a mountain range where blue clouds

are heaped above the horizon,

sees a garden of diamonds

through a hole scraped

in the frost patterns of his bedroom window

 

and sees yet another world

when tints of cerise and ochre

streak the evening sky.

He knows no end, at night

he sneaks glimpses of Heaven

through the moth-eaten carpet of the sky.

Marine.

Prostrate on the beach,
a slop of sea pulse,
a glob black as chewed tobacco
fallen from the lip.


My mother said -
the sea is sick,
it's breath on the beach is bad
and its puke is scattered
all over the sand.


She said
all its pin points are boiling,
its stomach heaves;
that it will yellow our skin
if it gets half a chance.


Then this morning,
when something with small eyes
came out of the sea,
I pelted stones at it
till the tractor came.

(from Sunfire)

The Dog

A dog built around his snarling teeth
demonstrates human instincts
when I cross his ground.
Glass stare, no, spikes from his face,
his crew cut spines speared,
snarl or smile, legs set in concrete:
stance consciousness.
The considered setting of his growl:
natural resonance of nerves.
The chosen time for a step:
psychology of closing, removing space,
building a crescendo of presence.
Then the howling with muscle release:
snap of dogs, snap of men.

The Happiest Days

The happiest days were the days before worries or responsibilities, before time was important; summer afternoons at home in Roscommon, childhood days,nothing to do but watch swallows circling and put the eye low to the lawn, imagining.

This poem was included in an excellent anthology, edited by Niall MacMonagle,"Real Cool, poems to grow up with"(Marino Books,1994). This is the anthology I would recommend to anyone who is dipping their toes into poetry, an inspired choice of poems from editor Niall MacMonagle


SUMMER ORCHARD EVENING.

On an evening
when apple was eating the worm,
tree grating the sun
with some clouds, dusty birds;
the green cloth
was spread to the orchard wall.

I watched bees collecting post
while cat was a tea cosy
with dozey trip-wire eyes.
Suddenly dog alarm in the hedge
comes bursting from the undergrowth:
big game hunter
and cat gone steeplejack.

Then dog winks
and we stretch out,
and I go back to being a microscope
eyeball deep in daisies.


Another poem I've posted previously comes from the same time:


Where The Poetry Comes From


Fathomless blue;
Blue sky.

Two swallows proclaiming it
Are extravagant

Dancers in an empty ballroom.
A church bell chimes

Two, three, five o’clock;
No matter;

Tracing curves to unending time;
A route to south Africa?

Fathomed true;
Blue sky.

In Mayo

Some places remain in your head all your life. Not intact, but fragments that still convey (broadly) the appearance of the place. So you return, and your geography is completely off but the essence is right.
As a student of Geology, I spent a week mapping in Finney near Lough Nafooey in Co. Mayo. A wonderful time and a wonderful place. The fragments have stayed with me ever since. When I wrote a poem “In Mayo” sometime around 1990, it was Finney I was thinking of.

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruthann/sets/72157600099944683/ for a range of photos from this beautiful area. From “Sunfire”:


In Mayo

The sky:

rags on bushes
in a wintry gale.

The barbed-wire fence:

a lunatic's music
sprinting down the valley.

The mountains:

tossed heads
with their silvery sheen.

Telephone wire:

daisy-chained voices
humming out of tune.

The lake:

a shirt that blew
off a line.

Rowan tree:

tongue on the mountain
shaping high C.

Mother Liked This Poem

To begin with, my mother was more than a little apprehensive of my writing poems. She dreaded finding herself published inside one of them. When one of my earliest publications turned out to be "Visiting the Corset Maker", her apprehension seemed well founded.Fortunately a friend of her's, who also visited the corset maker, liked the poem and her regard shifted.

However, she really did like "The Country Boy"; and though she occasionally wondered why I can't always write happy,pleasant poems, this poem convinced her that she could let me out with a biro in my hand.

When she had died I found her copy of "Sunfire" with press cuttings cellotaped in, and realised how proud she was of the book.

So for mother's day:

The Country Child.


The country child
runs in and out of rain showers
like rooms;

sees the snake-patterns in trains,
the sun's sword-play in the hedges
and the confetti in falling elder blossoms;

knows the humming in the telegraph poles
as the hedgerow's voice
when tar bubbles are ripe for bursting;

watches bees emerge from the caverns
at the centres of buttercups,
feels no end to a daisy chain,

feels no end to an afternoon;
walks on ice though it creaks;
sees fish among ripples and names them;

is conversant with berries
and hides behind thorns;
slips down leaves, behind stones;

fills his hands with the stream
and his hair with the smell of hay;
recognizes the chalkiness

of the weathered bones of sheep,
the humour in a rusted fence,
the feel of the white beards that hang there.

The country child
sees a mountain range where blue clouds
are heaped above the horizon,

sees a garden of diamonds
through a hole scraped
in the frost patterns of his bedroom window

and sees yet another world
when tints of cerise and ochre
streak the evening sky.

He knows no end, at night
he sneaks glimpses of Heaven
through the moth-eaten carpet of the sky.

The Empty Countryside

This poem from Sunfire is based on rural Ireland of the eighties,when the country was dotted with houses beginning to decay as they became peopled by elderly people or empty houses where parents or grandparents had died, children emigrated or in Dublin, no money to renovate. Today there are similarities, but it's the Chinese, eastern Europeans,Africans, who came for a while,that are leaving in their droves after the short-lived boom.

And there are thousands of empty houses, newly built houses, unfinished, half-finished; housing estates on the edges of towns left to be abandoned building sites. Without ever having been inhabited they lack the atmosphere which inspired this poem,they stand like rotting teeth on the landscape.

Inheriting The Land

Here the sea is no more than a sigh in a shell;
conversations speed past, pole high, Dublin to Galway
and music is the wind whistling beneath a door.
Slightness describes Summer's step,
stonework its skies; a little light drips
from its edges but it's falling from a miser's hand.
Across the fields the church, within its necklace
of dead congregations, is a rusty hinge;
a place filled with a century's stillness.
And the ivy-choked trees lean closer together
like old men guessing at each others' words.

If you were to fly over these patchwork hills,
along the hedgerows and through the lightless haggards,
you wouldn't meet a soul. The old farmers are sitting
in their twilight kitchens, their families standing
on the mantlepiece in the other room that's never used
with their faces tanned beneath American skies.
Only the din of crows seeps into that silence;
crows more numerous than leaves on the sycamores,
always bickering, hogging the light,
building their cities, staking their inheritance.

A Memory of Ireland Past

Since Christmas brings us back to family,loved ones and our memories of those who are gone, I thought I'd post this memory. It was another time, the mid-sixties.(from "Sunfire")


Visiting the Corsetmaker.

Miss Gately, you know, the corsetmaker; her cottage thatched and whitewashed beneath sycamores ragged with crows and their bickering.

A Sunday afternoon, my mother walking to the red door and it opened and closed and nothing else stirring for ages but ourselves in the back of the white consul with the red roof at the end of the avenue, just outside the gate;stone walls and lichen patches wallpapering our afternoon.Father dropping off in the driver’s seat while Micheal O'Hehir commentated on matches, one after another, without ever taking a breath in all that pipe smoke; matches collecting in the ash-tray all burnt to tiny black bird bones and the condensation all used up with words and faces dribbling pathetically into shapeless bad temper. Over and over: will she ever come out, can’t we go now,why do we always have to come, move your legs; till eventually she would reappear, a slap in the doorway, motor jauntily, red-headed,back to the car like it’s been five minutes or something, and Dad’s awake, reversing from the gate, back into the remains of a Sunday afternoon.

And I never knew what went on in there; never saw who opened the door,never saw a package, never heard anything about it. My father didn’t know either. I remember she took my sister with her when my sister was in secondary school;I wouldn’t have wanted to join them anyway,it was obviously a woman’s house.

Ruins

There is a particular atmosphere that pervades the ruins of cottages throughout rural Ireland. I think it has to do with their former humbleness, sometimes their isolation,the fact that it our own (and not so distant) history and also knowing that the famine emptied them and left them bleak reminders of our impoverished past.

I am drawn to them: to recreate the rooms in my mind, furnish them, family and belongings, visualise what it was to read by the light coming through that window, sit at the hearth, drop the head to avoid the lintel coming through the front door.

When the ridges can still be seen in the vegetable plot or a line of fuschia still survives outside the door delineating what was the extent of their patch, it is doubly poignant. The most moving place in Ireland is, I think, the deserted village on Achill. A huddle of about 100 ruined cottages. You get a strong sense of what it was to be in a community living so closely together. While standing there, and drawing on what you know from books like Peig or maybe the film “Man of Aran”, you people the streets quite easily; the place does it for you.

The mental images can be extremely vivid, the feeling very strong: a haunting sadness, and somehow a memory. And because you know it you do not want to leave soon.
Ireland is littered with these ruins. Like holy wells, they transport you to another place, a more thoughtful place. It is good that they survive.

Flickr has a number of photographs of the deserted village at Slievemore on Achill Island and numerous others of ruins througout Ireland.

from Sunfire

The hunch-doubled thorns,
ingrown pantries
dung-puddled;
the moss-stone walls
tumble-gapped.

The nettle-cracked doorway,
lintel-fallen
byre-footed;
the cloud curtained windows
elder-berried.

The stone-sheltered air
bumbled still,
ruin-reverent;
the submerged garden ridges
dumb-founded.

Over-reach youself

At the moment I can’t just decide to send poems to publishers and that’s been the way, give or take, for three or four years. Well no, I do decide, but then I change my mind. More than before I want to wow myself. And that’s not happening.

I think I should over-reach myself. In fact, I think everyone that’s involved in creative arts should want to over-reach themselves. Those who don’t, flirt with smugness and that’s a quick route to bland average work.

I have managed it a small number of times: to write better than I’m able to, and it’s a great but very rare feeling (for me at least). But I think it’s the measure to keep at the back of one’s mind.

Goya is one of those poems in which I think I've written beyond myself. I suppose good luck is involved: the right words, images etc come to mind on queue.I suppose that's the difference: great poets don't rely on luck.


Goya.

Of course not!
Of course no one that ever cracked open a head
has seen a symphony pour out.

No executioner has seen the flow of an amber fireside
with its intimate and tangling caresses
drain from the split skulls of lovers

nor have soldiers who shoot dark holes
seen rafts of memories spilling,
carrying the children, the birthdays, the orchards,
the dances.

When they shot the poet, Lorca,
the bullets sailed in a universe,
yet when the blood spurted it was only blood
to them.

Poem Beside Your Hospital Bed

My father is dead many years now. He came back from a holiday in the U.S. on a stretcher. When I saw him in the hospital that first time, I was shocked: he looked radically changed. There was little doubt that his last days had come. When Kay came to visit him, he couldn't welcome her so he sang something incomprehensible tunelessly.

Poem Beside Your Hospital Bed.

Your face,
that I loved,
has changed so completely
that I already know
our time is gone.

And as dying,
like a sandstorm,
rearranges your features,
I am useless,
a cripple of words.

So if the winds in your head
will carry the smallest breath
of what I am saying, father:
let it be that
my proud years are tatters here;
I love you.

The photograph is a collage of some drafts of poems including this one; it must be from the late eighties or early nineties.But best of all is the rejection slip from Poetry Ireland.

Roscommon

A few years after deciding I was finished writing a collection of poems called A Midland Town A Country Town which I undertook after seeing John Minihan’s photographs of Athy, I find I’m back in the middle of it again changing and fining and searching for more in those faces and more in my past. And my Roscommon past is turning out to be a rich source of untrampled poetry, but how much do I want to use it, or to be more precise how much do I want to use the people of the town.
The two towns being midland country towns would have had a lot in common; mind you the river and canal bring an extra layer of colour to Athy. Then again Roscommon’s county GAA pitch became an arena for rafting in the winter when the stand’s seats ( railway sleepers) would be arranged two along, two across and the boys from Ciaran’s Park became gondoliers.
Growing up in a town like Roscommon in that time (60’s/70’s) had huge advantages, it was safe, it had the benefits of a county town while being knee-deep in countryside, it had its fair share of historic buildings, (an impressive castle and abbey) which we had the run of, and was close enough to river and lake for sweltering July afternoons. On top of that my family came from there, or half of, and so it was home.
I have no doubt that it was those roots that are the roots of my writing too. And that brings me back to the collection A Midland Town A Country Town and how much I want to use it.


The Boy Who Watched For Apparitions.


Goodnight to the twin moons
stretched along the railway tracks
outside Roscommon.
My night-time window halved
with those trains rushing across the glass,
strips of film filled with their own lives:
adventurers and bon-vivants,
whose strings of lights recreated as they passed
the grassy slope, the elder bushes,
the buffer with the hole in the side;
strangers oblivious to such little worlds
and to the boy who watched for apparitions
from his bedroom window.
And in a moment they were gone,
leaving the darkness darker and the boy listening,
trying to gauge where the sounds
finally disappeared into the wind.


What lay beyond that window-world ?

The station to the right,
the white gates to the left,
and then..........


Now I remember those film strips
sailing through that pitch emptiness;
sometimes they were only ruffed impressions
when the window was full of pouring rain.
I remember how my imagination filled like a can
when all that was left was the headlight's beam
over the trees of Bully's Acre.
And there is often disappointment in these poems;
the disappointment of that place beyond
where the rhythms of trains were reclaimed by the wind.

from Sunfire (Dedalus Press)