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.

District and Circle

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.

*