From A Childhood

 

It’s late, the sky’s my screen. Laurence Olivier is fleeing

through a forest, dark fronds clutching, clawing at him;

a gothic tale, full of the drama of black and white.

The forest is vast and he must run blindly through it,

somewhere behind is the story I haven’t seen, and

somewhere ahead is a boundary with a land no one knows.

I am at my window, the land I know is quenched;

above, across the inexplicable expanse of the Heavens, is adventure;

I watch it, take it to my bed, and know tomorrow colour will return.

Happy New Year.

The Fugitive

The one-armed man will arrive into town, most likely by train, the train runs two fields

behind the house, Kimble will be on his heals; he had that twitch that I worked on.

I would jerk my mouth into my cheek, I had it perfect, practised in front of the mirror;

especially if there’s girls around; no one would guess that there’s a secret press behind

the mirror; it’s got a nice smell; I often open it to get the smell. The grassland over the tracks

was the place for men that had to keep moving, I could lose myself there. Cowboys ride

that vast emptiness, stopping here and there to slake their thirsts; I like the way they sweat,

the Virginian sweats a lot. I know the water hole just beyond the line, there’s a tree there that

I kitted out as my fort; my stash of stones; indians and germans creep through the grass,

and indians crawl up the embankment to ambush the train over by the elder tree where I get

my swords. It would be hard to see them; you can get a good view standing on the buffer.

Jesus threatened to come off his cross at three o’ clock on Good Friday. Mam hated thunder,

we said the rosary during thunder storms; men on bicycles were always getting struck by lightening

over near Tremane. I’d go into the cubby hole under the stairs, past the box of polish tins into the pitch dark.
There was a door there that opened into a cave; I keep some secrets in the space under the cylinder
in the hot press; I don’t think anyone in the world knows that hiding place is there.

Well

It was a barracks of an old house, the upper stories

well on the way to ruin, the lower a little way behind.

The eighteenth century kitchen flagged and dim;

its only light, through a small grimy window,

fell grey and listless onto the floor. When the back door

was open, a small out-house threatened to tumble in.

Outside, a cobbled yard that backed onto a wood of beech

and oak; itself threatened by briars and nettles; home to one

item of modernity, Tom’s black bicycle, leaning against the wall

with the air of just having come from or be about to go to town

for groceries, chops, tobacco; and opposite it, amidst encroaching

greenery, the well.

How to describe the magic of the well in that tumble-down yard:

its decrepit wall cracked and mossy, hemp rope with bucket hanging

down, dim distant eye forever staring. The lowering of the bucket,

clanking as it went, a faraway splash and clear cold water recovered,

as though we’d lifted it from legend, from depths that were unfathomed,

from the jaws of monsters no one would dare to imagine.

What the Nighttime Brought

This countryside, known for its emptiness, was, after the hours of daylight,

filled with a darkness so impenetrable we viewed it with fear and wonder.

And when the wind streamed into the night, it brought with it all manner

of creatures, monsters, ghosts who guffawed, screeched, clanked and roared

in the hedgerows, the trees, took possession of outhouses, clambered over roofs,

slithered under doors, howled down chimneys, loitered along the roadsides.

Few had the gift of seeing into that dark, but old James Guihan saw. In our kitchen,

he told us of the mad woman who walked the cur wolf on the end of a rope,

came into our garden on September nights to steal our apples, and the Pooka’s

red eyes that sometimes flashed in at a window, so children must stay in their beds

because those eyes lured boys and girls to the undergound homes of fairies from which

they never returned. He told us about the banshee whose wails presaged a death,

and the lowlifes whose trade entailed their poking in the hedges for strays and runaways,

and his warning that only our night prayers kept us safe in our beds.

Still, night after night, we braved the bedroom window, the thinness of its glass,

to gaze into the pitch-blackness that chased our days away. We looked out

to where the familiar fields had been, trees we climbed, the sheds that were our forts,

saw nothing, and were terrorized by the uncertainty of the world we thought was ours.

From a Child's Window

The child is at the window; he is there every evening

at this time, as the clouds of the world are catching fire. He knows

the fields behind his house: the hay-shed with the tunnels through the bales,

the wrecked car under the elders where some of the hens are laying,

the field with the maze of pathways through the furze.

Beyond that, the railway line where the lesser known world begins.

He has been there, where the fields are wide and there are no houses,

to the water hole where the small fish dart from weed cover to weed cover;

that’s where the prairie begins, where cowboys travel alone.

To the left, the railway line cuts straight to the white gates;

he has seen the gates; beyond them trains travel days, weeks

across parched deserts, open steppes, past wadis, oases. The passengers

seldom look: tuxedoed gentlemen with glinting teeth are tipping whiskeys

lit by a million lights in crystal glasses to feather-boa’d women

whose champagne drinks sparkle back from the tips of their slender arms.

He knows the station is to the right, and there’s the bridge he loves to stand on

when the four o’clock is coming through. The excitement as the engine appears,

slowing to the platform, then starts up, and the carriage roofs passing beneath him,

he loves that; then the last of it, the tail slithering away from the station.

Where to? He does not know. It goes into a place he has no thoughts on;

the evening train into the hours he sleeps through; that is where darkness is.

Whale Song

When I was young

night cleared away the countryside;

there was nothing till morning.

Sometimes a dog barked;

barked into the void;

that bark carried forever.

When I hear whale song,

I hear the void;

I hear childhood terror.

Berry Picking

On a windy day I could hear the conversations speeding through the phone wires:

Roscommon to Dublin, Roscommon to Galway, the Dublin express thrumming through.

I would stand below them,  listening, waiting for one word to fall, mercury-drop perfect,

down past the briars, dog roses, blackthorns, elders, into the can of the young boy’s ear.

Lost in Adulthood

Explorers

Poem for Elaine

Then, I was the explorer

with that pedal happiness in my feet;

down a tunnel of laurels

or wellington-deep in water.

Now I have to be reminded:

there are furze trails to be charted,

tracking to be done in the tall grass,

and we should be deadly quiet

in the hedge caverns after dark.

Imagination and Terror

        Sunfire

When sunset was a match put to the western sky,

hell blazed over the Galway Road.

From my bedroom window, I watched the clouds catching fire,

the inferno spreading towards my house.

At the end of the day, hell conquered heaven.

My house so close;

getting into bed, I anticipated apparitions,

knowing that God’s bright sun had fallen into that fire.