When You Were Born

When you were born bells peeled, klaxons sounded
and choirs sang hallelujahs in my head.
I cradled you and marvelled. Surrounded
by wonders I slept soundly in my bed.

Ten years on you made me laugh, told me things
I did not know. You had a knack that brightened
the space around you. I was like glass that sings
in sympathy. My heartstrings tightened.

At twenty, a head and shoulders higher,
you fizz with life and sometimes parachute
into my days. You have the skill to fire
people up but leave me trailing in pursuit.

Swollen with pride my heart leapt
at your coming, and when you went I wept.

Thin Ice

The Inuit word is sikuaq, ice so
thin you cannot trust it, for dangers skulk
in its growing and dying, its slow flow
and ebb of strength, the life within its bulk.
The secret is to spread yourself, avoid
all sudden movement, concentrate on how
the ice breathes, sense its mood, how it is buoyed
up by the dark water below.
                                                          Now
edge to where it leads you and try to find
a path that may not be there, like a spare
rib in a frozen skeleton or a blind
lover sensing tension beneath bare
skin: like love the outcome a leap of faith,
unknowable until it is too late.

Happy Hour

Again, from somewhere,
the amber idea
has
         sidled
                      up
filled waiting mindspace,
blunted this morning’s curiosity.

Once conceived the notion nags,
weaves tendrils through all other thoughts
crouched
                     down
                                  there
tight as a balled root,
fixed as a fat tick.

Need fidgets
like too much change in a trouser pocket:
its restless
                       breathless
                                              presence
strung taut across the mind’s wires
grows gimlet sharp.

But, at the bar at last,
for five full minutes or maybe more
it’s pure magic
                               celestial bliss
                                                           supernal blessing
optimism in a straight-sided glass
and stillness settles like dew on parched grass.

The Keeper

People were surprised to hear he’d been there forty years,
and yet it had been easy.
Swept up by the daring of the impossible enterprise
he watched the tower rise, block by block,
an ungainly birth from the rocks
until, with sheets and scaffold swept away,
the clean new thing stood strong in its proper place,
tall as truth, steady as a lodestar,
its lines an affront to the chaos of tide race.
And the memory of how it was before,
the basalt reef churned and drenched
the waters heaving prussian blue and acid white,
still burned his mind.

And then the complex business of topping out
and the necessary equipment,
derrick, hawser, winch, windlass,
flares and mirrors, ladders, rails, pumps and cylinders,
and the conductor fixed at the highest point;
not to speak of all the domestic offices,
the scullery, stores, parlour, pantry
and the room set aside for sleep,
for a man must have all he needs to survive in such a place.
The woman too: spoons and firkins,
brooms and ladles and washboards,
skillets, kettles, curtains,
and the writing desk where she sat during her afternoons.
She lasted less than a year after the child was gone
for the comfort she needed
was beyond his power to give.

Later it became easier: the routine inspections,
the constant adjustments and minor improvements.
Periodic deliveries of supplies were an intrusion
for they distracted from his purpose.
And always the passing of gulls and the surge of swell:
neither days nor nights were ever still.
Shags and guillemots became his friends, and strangers
in passing ships watched for his light.

When after many years they sent him a letter
to tell him it was time for him to go
he placed it unopened on his table.
It lay like a carefully crafted sentence,
an inscription on an unloved grave.
Twice they had to come for him in the end,
the second time with dogs and axes,
taking him trussed but still crying out.
Now in the silence
he counts the lives he saved with his own.

The Mackerel Pit

When the tide is right
I slip out past the last buoy
to the mackerel pit.
Lines meet at house, hill, spit, copse,
and I drift
as soft sea slaps the hull’s hollow.

Then it is time for rod, line, knife, bucket, priest
and sometimes I shave grey fish flesh,
impaling sushi on each beaked barb.
The long-line drops on its weight.
I watch each baited hook glow ghost white
down through the watery dark.

My lures are gaudy fairground glitter.
They plumb their depths
while the line reels out turn on turn
to where the very idea of air
is no more than a faintness of light,
and I can reel in and play and wait.

And when it comes it is rainbow-oily,
wrenched from its element, flipping and leaping,
even out of water, true to itself.
Embraced by my warm fist it awaits the priest.
It knows only what is known in the dark glitter of the sea,
twitching, flexing, like silver drowned in air.

I would like to think these barbed hooks
no more barbarous than a passing-on of old ways
and though the days of whiting and cod,
herring and ling, are long gone
and deep down the mackerel pit is dying,
the old stories still hold.

Blackwater

These are plain graves, straightforward even though
there has been suffering here: twenty headstones,
cast one morning from the same concrete as the dam,
and stacked with pipes and blocks until they were required.

Five hundred foot of ice had already done the groundwork:
the glacier had oozed and scraped, hollowed and rounded,
until only finishing touches were needed.
Three thousand men could swarm and swear,
sweat and cower and huddle from the wind.
And when the work was done
a dais was set up and crowds came out to cheer
as sluice gates rose and water flowed.

These are plain names: William Brady,
John Day, Robert Fitch, John Wilson.
Right through that year each month
they must have buried one, and sometimes several,
each man overtaken by his personal calling
to be crushed or blown apart or drowned
and brought to this patch of grass and heather.
No doubt some grumbled at the extra work
the barked shins, the stumbling over boulders,
the thumb stove on splintered rock.
Picks rose and fell to gouge each grave.

Yet many were lucky, escaping
with buckled limbs or jellied scars
that spoke later of their winters at the dam.
And each in the end found his own alternative,
at the Somme, or back home in Kildare
or nodding in a chair in Cumbernauld.

Requiem

Begin at the end, or near it:
assembled molecules fall apart.
Already your imprint fades.
Evening finds you crouched four-square,
forced flat in an ultimate act.
Bones have been broken,
gobbets of fur ground into gravel,
your trim coat shredded
to tatters of gaping leather.
And yet your form remains,
teeth bared in an unflinching grin,
paws poised to box the earth,
one ear cocked jauntily for your last trump
of engine and wheels.

Yesterday I saw your mate.
She loped easily up the sandy bank
to case the autumn hedge.
This winter will she visit your remains
or skirt them warily, unsettled by
a sense of what you were?
And when in spring
the last of your bleached bones is kicked aside,
the last ball of your fur caught by the wind,
will she still stop mid-lope to sniff for your scent?

How All Our Making’s Made

The swallows had long gone south again
down their old ley lines when I found their nest tight
against the transom of the byre door. Bound
together: grass, dross, feathers, shit, perched light
as light on the top shelf out of harm’s way
while on a different continent the code
for its design, location, usage, lay
lodged deep in a bird’s brain, an unknown lode.
Such rough perfection.
What was found, hidden
neatly within the double helix called
deoxyribonucleic acid
wasn’t just why eyes are blue: warrens, walled
cities, motorways lie there. Its charmed braid
transmits and stores how all our making’s made.

A deceit of lapwings

‘the false lapwynge, ful of trecherye’ Geoffrey Chaucer

Consider the shame of that name
even as they roller-coast over open skies,
over the secrets of ploughed fields,
keening and whooping to draw the farmhand on
away from their own open secret
nestled in its dark furrow.
See how she drags her uninjured wing
luring him from her little ones
as the boy with his bag counts his eggs,
and hatches in his mind
the money that will nestle in his purse.

Yet all over the down lands the skies are still thick
with the rush of their crossing, the thrum of their passing.

I know them by their secret names,
peewit, pie-wipe, chewit, tuefit,
the language of eggers and washmen and netters,
toppyup, peasiewheep, teewhuppo, thievnick,
telling their stories to tillers and ploughmen,
plivver, ticks-nicket, thievnig, peeweet.

And even now when a few come from nowhere
they are the sound of spring
a pied handful thrown against heaven,
the sky’s calligraphy.
They swoop and tumble for the madness of it,
and cry, wheezy and slurred,
soft and wild, joyful and grieving.

To lean on my spade
and open my heart to their wing music
and watch their looping sky-dance
and how they play with the wind,
is to want for nothing.