District and Circle (3 page)

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.

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.

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.

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 trim 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.

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.

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—

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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—