I thought of you continuously

A thousand miles south where Italy

Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.

Your ordinariness was renewed there.

The Given Note

On the most westerly Blasket

In a dry-stone hut

He got this air out of the night.

Strange noises were heard

By others who followed, bits of a tune

Coming in on loud weather

Though nothing like melody.

He blamed their fingers and ear

As unpractised, their fiddling easy

For he had gone alone into the island

And brought back the whole thing.

The house throbbed like his full violin.

So whether he calls it spirit music

Or not, I don’t care. He took it

Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

Still he maintains, from nowhere.

It comes off the bow gravely,

Rephrases itself into the air.

Bogland

for T. P. Flanagan

We have no prairies

To slice a big sun at evening –

Everywhere the eye concedes to

Encroaching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye

Of a tarn. Our unfenced country

Is bog that keeps crusting

Between the sights of the sun.

They’ve taken the skeleton

Of the Great Irish Elk

Out of the peat, set it up,

An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk under

More than a hundred years

Was recovered salty and white.

The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,

Missing its last definition

By millions of years.

They’ll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks

Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Our pioneers keep striking

Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip

Seems camped on before.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.

The wet centre is bottomless.

Anahorish

My ‘place of clear water’,

the first hill in the world

where springs washed into

the shiny grass

and darkened cobbles

in the bed of the lane.

Anahorish, soft gradient

of consonant, vowel-meadow,

after-image of lamps

swung through the yards

on winter evenings.

With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers

go waist-deep in mist

to break the light ice

at wells and dunghills.

Broagh

Riverbank, the long rigs

ending in broad docken

and a canopied pad

down to the ford.

The garden mould

bruised easily, the shower

gathering in your heelmark

was the black O

in Broagh,

its low tattoo

among the windy boortrees

and rhubarb-blades

ended almost

suddenly, like that last

gh the strangers found

difficult to manage.

The Other Side

I

Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds,

a neighbour laid his shadow

on the stream, vouching

‘It’s as poor as Lazarus, that ground,’

and brushed away

among the shaken leafage.

I lay where his lea sloped

to meet our fallow,

nested on moss and rushes,

my ear swallowing

his fabulous, biblical dismissal,

that tongue of chosen people.

When he would stand like that

on the other side, white-haired,

swinging his blackthorn

at the marsh weeds,

he prophesied above our scraggy acres,

then turned away