Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed

As you always do, are like a local road

We’ve known every turn of in the past –

That midge-veiled, high-hedged side-road where you stood

Looking and listening until a car

Would come and go and leave you lonelier

Than you had been to begin with. So, sing on,

Dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran,

Sing yourself to where the singing comes from,

Ardent and cut off like our blind neighbour

Who played the piano all day in her bedroom.

Her notes came out to us like hoisted water

Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead

Where next thing we’d be listening, hushed and awkward.

*

That blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician

Was like a silver vein in heavy clay.

Night water glittering in the light of day.

But also just our neighbour, Rosie Keenan.

She touched our cheeks. She let us touch her braille

In books like books wallpaper patterns came in.

Her hands were active and her eyes were full

Of open darkness and a watery shine.

She knew us by our voices. She’d say she ‘saw’

Whoever or whatever. Being with her

Was intimate and helpful, like a cure

You didn’t notice happening. When I read

A poem with Keenan’s well in it, she said,

‘I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.’

At Banagher

Then all of a sudden there appears to me

The journeyman tailor who was my antecedent:

Up on a table, cross-legged, ripping out

A garment he must recut or resew,

His lips tight back, a thread between his teeth,

Keeping his counsel always, giving none,

His eyelids steady as wrinkled horn or iron.

Self-absenting, both migrant and ensconced;

Admitted into kitchens, into clothes

His touch has the power to turn to cloth again –

All of a sudden he appears to me,

Unopen, unmendacious, unillumined.

*

So more power to him on the job there, ill at ease

Under my scrutiny in spite of years

Of being inscrutable as he threaded needles

Or matched the facings, linings, hems and seams.

He holds the needle just off centre, squinting,

And licks the thread and licks and sweeps it through,

Then takes his time to draw both ends out even,

Plucking them sharply twice. Then back to stitching.

Does he ever question what it all amounts to

Or ever will? Or care where he lays his head?

My Lord Buddha of Banagher, the way

Is opener for your being in it.

Postscript