Me at the bedside, incubating for real,

Peering, appearing to her as she closes

And opens her eyes, then lapses back

Into a faraway smile whose precinct of vision

I would enter every time, to assist and be asked

In that hoarsened whisper of triumph,

‘And what do you think

Of the new wee baby the doctor brought for us all

When I was asleep?’

The Clothes Shrine

It was a whole new sweetness

In the early days to find

Light white muslin blouses

On a see-through nylon line

Drip-drying in the bathroom

Or a nylon slip in the shine

Of its own electricity –

As if St Brigid once more

Had rigged up a ray of sun

Like the one she’d strung on air

To dry her own cloak on

(Hard-pressed Brigid, so

Unstoppably on the go) –

The damp and slump and unfair

Drag of the workaday

Made light of and got through

As usual, brilliantly.

from Sonnets from Hellas

1 Into Arcadia

It was opulence and amen on the mountain road.

Walnuts bought on a high pass from a farmer

Who’d worked in Melbourne once and now trained water

Through a system of pipes and runnels of split reed

Known in Hellas, probably, since Hesiod –

That was the least of it. When we crossed the border

From Argos into Arcadia, and farther

Into Arcadia, a lorry-load

Of apples had burst open on the road

So that for yards our tyres raunched and scrunched them

But we drove on, juiced up and fleshed and spattered,

Revelling in it. And then it was the goatherd

With his goats in the forecourt of the filling station,

Subsisting beyond eclogue and translation.

Anahorish 1944

‘We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.

A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood

Outside the slaughterhouse. From the main road

They would have heard the squealing,

Then heard it stop and had a view of us

In our gloves and aprons coming down the hill.

Two lines of them, guns on their shoulders, marching.

Armoured cars and tanks and open jeeps.

Sunburnt hands and arms. Unknown, unnamed,

Hosting for Normandy.

Not that we knew then

Where they were headed, standing there like youngsters

As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.’

Anything Can Happen

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.

Helmet