I

Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the cross-trees

Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him

But still green water and clean bottom sand,

The ship aground, the canted mast far out

Above a sea-floor where striped fish pass in shoals –

And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands

That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead

Appears to rise again … ‘But he was dead enough,’

The story says, ‘being both shot and drowned.’

II

A birch tree planted twenty years ago

Comes between the Irish Sea and me

At the attic skylight, a man marooned

In his own loft, a boy

Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,

Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced

By all that’s thrumming up from keel to masthead,

Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most

Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.

III

Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma

Of hallway linoleum, grandfather now appears,

His voice a-waver like the draught-prone screen

They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier

For the matinee I’ve just come back from.

‘And Isaac Hands,’ he asks, ‘Was Isaac in it?’

His memory of the name a-waver too,

His mistake perpetual, once and for all,

Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.

IV

As I age and blank on names,

As my uncertainty on stairs

Is more and more the lightheadedness

Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,

As the memorable bottoms out

Into the irretrievable,

It’s not that I can’t imagine still

That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt

As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

A Kite for Aibhín

after ‘L’Aquilone’ by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912)

Air from another life and time and place,

Pale blue heavenly air is supporting

A white wing beating high against the breeze,

And yes, it is a kite! As when one afternoon

All of us there trooped out

Among the briar hedges and stripped thorn,

I take my stand again, halt opposite

Anahorish Hill to scan the blue,

Back in that field to launch our long-tailed comet.

And now it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew,

Lifts itself, goes with the wind until

It rises to loud cheers from us below.

Rises, and my hand is like a spindle

Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower

Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher

The longing in the breast and planted feet

And gazing face and heart of the kite flier

Until string breaks and – separate, elate –

The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.

In Time

for Síofra

Energy, balance, outbreak:

Listening to Bach

I saw you years from now

(More years than I’ll be allowed)

Your toddler wobbles gone,

A sure and grown woman.

Your bare foot on the floor

Keeps me in step; the power

I first felt come up through

Our cement floor long ago

Palps your sole and heel

And earths you here for real.