His bicycle stood at the window-sill,

The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher

Skirting the front mudguard,

Its fat black handlegrips

Heating in sunlight, the ‘spud’

Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,

The pedal treads hanging relieved

Of the boot of the law.

His cap was upside down

On the floor, next his chair.

The line of its pressure ran like a bevel

In his slightly sweating hair.

He had unstrapped

The heavy ledger, and my father

Was making tillage returns

In acres, roods, and perches.

Arithmetic and fear.

I sat staring at the polished holster

With its buttoned flap, the braid cord

Looped into the revolver butt.

‘Any other root crops?

Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?’

‘No.’ But was there not a line

Of turnips where the seed ran out

In the potato field? I assumed

Small guilts and sat

Imagining the black hole in the barracks.

He stood up, shifted the baton-case

Further round on his belt,

Closed the domesday book,

Fitted his cap back with two hands,

And looked at me as he said goodbye.

A shadow bobbed in the window.

He was snapping the carrier spring

Over the ledger. His boot pushed off

And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

4. Summer 1969

4 Summer 1969

While the Constabulary covered the mob

Firing into the Falls, I was suffering

Only the bullying sun of Madrid.

Each afternoon, in the casserole heat

Of the flat, as I sweated my way through

The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket

Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.

At night on the balcony, gules of wine,

A sense of children in their dark corners,

Old women in black shawls near open windows,

The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.

We talked our way home over starlit plains

Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil

Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’

Another conjured Lorca from his hill.

We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports

On the television, celebrities

Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

I retreated to the cool of the Prado.

Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’

Covered a wall – the thrown-up arms

And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted

And knapsacked military, the efficient

Rake of the fusillade. In the next room,

His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall –

Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn

Jewelled in the blood of his own children,

Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips

Over the world. Also, that holmgang

Where two berserks club each other to death

For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.

He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished

The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

6. Exposure

6 Exposure

It is December in Wicklow:

Alders dripping, birches

Inheriting the last light,

The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lost

Should be visible at sunset,

Those million tons of light

Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,