And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,

Alive and ticking like an electric fence:

Had I not been awake I would have missed it,

It came and went so unexpectedly

And almost it seemed dangerously,

Returning like an animal to the house,

A courier blast that there and then

Lapsed ordinary. But not ever

After. And not now.

The Conway Stewart

‘Medium’, 14-carat nib,

Three gold bands in the clip-on screw-top,

In the mottled barrel a spatulate, thin

Pump-action lever

The shopkeeper

Demonstrated,

The nib uncapped,

Treating it to its first deep snorkel

In a newly opened ink-bottle,

Guttery, snottery,

Letting it rest then at an angle

To ingest,

Giving us time

To look together and away

From our parting, due that evening,

To my longhand

‘Dear’

To them, next day.

Chanson d’Aventure

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,

But yet the body is his book.

I

Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked

In position for the drive,

Bone-shaken, bumped at speed,

The nurse a passenger in front, you ensconced

In her vacated corner seat, me flat on my back –

Our postures all the journey still the same,

Everything and nothing spoken,

Our eyebeams threaded laser-fast, no transport

Ever like it until then, in the sunlit cold

Of a Sunday morning ambulance

When we might, O my love, have quoted Donne

On love on hold, body and soul apart.

II

Apart: the very word is like a bell

That the sexton Malachy Boyle outrolled

In illo tempore in Bellaghy

Or the one I tolled in Derry in my turn

As college bellman, the haul of it there still

In the heel of my once capable

Warm hand, hand that I could not feel you lift

And lag in yours throughout that journey

When it lay flop-heavy as a bellpull

And we careered at speed through Dungloe,

Glendoan, our gaze ecstatic and bisected

By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula.

III

The charioteer at Delphi holds his own,

His six horses and chariot gone,

His left hand lopped

From a wrist protruding like an open spout,

Bronze reins astream in his right, his gaze ahead

Empty as the space where the team should be,

His eyes-front, straight-backed posture like my own

Doing physio in the corridor, holding up

As if once more I’d found myself in step

Between two shafts, another’s hand on mine,

Each slither of the share, each stone it hit

Registered like a pulse in the timbered grips.

Miracle

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks

But the ones who have known him all along

And carry him in –

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked

In their backs, the stretcher handles

Slippery with sweat. And no let-up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable

And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.

Be mindful of them as they stand and wait