District and Circle (2 page)

A bedroom, bright morning,

A man and a woman,

Their backs to the bedhead

And me at the foot.

It was your first leave,

A stranger arrived

In a house with no upstairs,

But heaven enough

To be going on with.

First it went back to grass, then after that

To warehouses and brickfields (designated

The Creagh Meadows Industrial Estate),

Its wartime grey control tower rebuilt and glazed

Into a hard-edged CEO style villa:

Toome Aerodrome had turned to local history.

Hangars, runways, bomb stores, Nissen huts,

The perimeter barbed wire, forgotten and gone.

But not a smell of daisies and hot tar

On a newly surfaced cart road, Easter Monday,

1944. And not, two miles away that afternoon,

The annual bright booths of the fair at Toome,

All the brighter for having been denied.

No catchpenny stalls for us, no

Awnings, bonnets, or beribboned gauds:

Wherever the world was, we were somewhere else,

Had been and would be. Sparrows might fall,

B-26 Marauders not return, but the sky above

That land usurped by a compulsory order

Watched and waited—like me and her that day

Watching and waiting by the perimeter.

A fear crossed over then like the fly-by-night

And sun-repellent wing that flies by day

Invisibly above: would she rise and go

With the pilot calling from his Thunderbolt?

But for her part, in response, only the slightest

Back-stiffening and standing of her ground

As her hand reached down and tightened around mine.

If self is a location, so is love:

Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,

Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,

Here and there and now and then, a stance.

after Horace,
Odes,
I, 34

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter

Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head

Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now

He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth

And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,

The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.

Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,

Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune

Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,

Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight

Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.

Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.

Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

Bobby Breen’s. His Boston fireman’s gift

With
BREEN
in scarlet letters on its spread

Fantailing brim,

Tinctures of sweat and hair oil

In the withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs

Beneath the crown—

Or better say the crest, for crest it is—

Leather-trimmed, steel-ridged, hand-tooled, hand-sewn,

Tipped with a little bud of beaten copper …

Bobby Breen’s badged helmet’s on my shelf

These twenty years, “the headgear

Of the tribe,” as O’Grady called it

In right heroic mood that afternoon

When the fireman-poet presented it to me

As “the visiting fireman”—

As if I were up to it, as if I had

Served time under it, his fire-thane’s shield,

His shoulder-awning, while shattering glass

And rubble-bolts out of a burning roof

Hailed down on every hatchet man and hose man there

Till the hard-reared shield-wall broke.

November morning sunshine on my back

This bell-clear Sunday, elbows lodged strut-firm

On the unseasonably warm

Top bar of a gate, inspecting livestock,

Catching gleams of the distant Viking
vik

Of Wicklow Bay; thinking
scriptorium,

Norse raids, night-dreads, and that “fierce raiders” poem

About storm on the Irish Sea—so no attack

In the small hours or next morning; thinking shock

Out of the blue or blackout, the staggered walk

Of a donkey on the TV news last night—

Loosed from a cart that had loosed five mortar shells

In the bazaar district, wandering out of shot

Lost to its owner, lost for its sunlit hills.

Early autumn morning hesitated,

Shying at newness, an emptiness behind

Scorched linden trees still crowding in around

The moorland house, now just one more wallstead

Where youngsters gathered up from god knows where

Hunted and yelled and ran wild in a pack.

Yet all of them fell silent when he appeared,

The son of the place, and with a long forked stick

Dragged an out-of-shape old can or kettle

From under hot, half burnt away house-beams;

And then, like one with a doubtful tale to tell,

Turned to the others present, at great pains

To make them realize what had stood so.

For now that it was gone, it all seemed

Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh.

And he was changed: a foreigner among them.

Tunes from a tin whistle underground

Curled up a corridor I’d be walking down

To where I knew I was always going to find

My watcher on the tiles, cap by his side,

His fingers perked, his two eyes eyeing me

In an unaccusing look I’d not avoid,

Or not just yet, since both were out to see

For ourselves.

                         
As the music larked and capered

I’d trigger and untrigger a hot coin

Held at the ready, but now my gaze was lowered

For was our traffic not in recognition?

Accorded passage, I would re-pocket and nod,

And he, still eyeing me, would also nod.

Posted, eyes front, along the dreamy ramparts

Of escalators ascending and descending

To a monotonous slight rocking in the works,

We were moved along, upstanding.

Elsewhere, underneath, an engine powered,

Rumbled, quickened, evened, quieted.

The white tiles gleamed. In passages that flowed

With draughts from cooler tunnels, I missed the light

Of all-overing, long since mysterious day,

Parks at lunchtime where the sunners lay

On body-heated mown grass regardless,

A resurrection scene minutes before

The resurrection, habitués

Of their garden of delights, of staggered summer.

Another level down, the platform thronged.

I re-entered the safety of numbers,

A crowd half straggle-ravelled and half strung

Like a human chain, the pushy newcomers

Jostling and purling underneath the vault,

On their marks to be first through the doors,

Street-loud, then succumbing to herd-quiet …

Had I betrayed or not, myself or him?

Always new to me, always familiar,

This unrepentant, now repentant turn

As I stood waiting, glad of a first tremor,

Then caught up in the now-or-never whelm

Of one and all the full length of the train.

Stepping on to it across the gap,

On to the carriage metal, I reached to grab

The stubby black roof-wort and take my stand

From planted ball of heel to heel of hand

As sweet traction and heavy down-slump stayed me.

I was on my way, well girded, yet on edge,

Spot-rooted, buoyed, aloof,

Listening to the dwindling noises off,

My back to the unclosed door, the platform empty;

And wished it could have lasted,

That long between-times pause before the budge

And glaze-over, when any forwardness

Was unwelcome and bodies readjusted,

Blindsided to themselves and other bodies.

So deeper into it, crowd-swept, strap-hanging,

My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail,

My father’s glazed face in my own waning

And craning …

                          
Again the growl

Of shutting doors, the jolt and one-off treble

Of iron on iron, then a long centrifugal

Haulage of speed through every dragging socket.

And so by night and day to be transported

Through galleried earth with them, the only relict

Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward,

Reflecting in a window mirror-backed

By blasted weeping rock-walls.

                                            -            
Flicker-lit.

The men began arguing about the spiky bushes that were in brilliant

yellow bloom on the slopes: were they caltrop or gorse? … “That

reminds me of something,” said George. “I don’t know …”

That greeny stuff about your feet

is asphodel and rightly so,

but why do I think
seggans
?

And of a spring day

in your days of ‘71: Poseidon

making waves in sea and air

around Cape Sounion, its very name

all ozone-breeze and cavern-boom,

too utterly this-worldly, George, for you

intent upon an otherworldly scene

somewhere just beyond

the summit ridge, the cutting edge

of not remembering.

The bloody light. To hell with it.

Close eyes and concentrate.

Not crown of thorns, not sceptre reed

or Herod’s court, but ha!

you had it! A harrowing, yes, in hell:

the hackle-spikes

that Plato told of, the tyrant’s fate

in a passage you would quote:

“They bound him hand and foot,