(Hill Lucre)

The Senate ascends the Campanile:

he’d worked the magnification up to ten

and could identify quite easily

which galleon it was threading the horizon

an hour or more from harbour – information

worth a purseful to the merchants

crowding the Rialto – and when he’d worked

up a few more mercantile triumphs,

Galileo trained his novel apparatus

on the night, and look, up close the moon

is not featureless and luminous

but scarred as a clean peach stone.

(Giants Pope and Pagan)

Urban the Eighth ordered all the birds

in the gardens of the Vatican be caught

in nets and killed, since their song disturbed

his concentration, and on the Ides of March

as he and the engineer from Pisa strolled

along the arboreal corridors, chaperoned

by apple blossom, bathed in speckled under-shade,

now freed into the sudden joy of green

noon-light, a taut attenuated

silence trailed behind them like a bridal train

of the whitest, finest silk . . . Friends still,

still respectful, still exerting considerable

pull on the other, as dense bodies will –

and an arrow’s flight along the Tiber

Hugh O’Neill, the Great O’Neill

lay blind and crying out and dying

in a shuttered ground-floor stanza

of the Palazzo dei Penitenziari

(Vanity Fair)

(where four hundred years ahead

I would hear Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin read,

still with no clue how her surname was said).

(Valley of Humiliation)

Because the problem with leaving home

is home follows, and by the time Tyrone

left, having exhausted his usefulness,

he had been baited to his beard and mocked,

the lands lost, his rights to hunt and fish lost . . .

Fake obeisance, real fear, such dissimulation:

all that saps the character, infects the will

and the greatest danger to the English

since the time of Silken Thomas dwindled

in the warm south; his sight began to go;

he slept with an unsheathed sword by his side

and drank too much, and remembered, and attended

to matters with great pride and a little shame,

drafting letters home, complaining and battling with

Lombard, plotting the Spanish Ambassador’s visit:

and those of us left eventually annexed

the fort at Tullyhogue for hide-and-seek,

then menthol cigarettes and adolescent sex.

(Mount Clear)

A roll-bar cattle grid in the car park

and steeply up to a flat-topped hillock,

a ring of trees sunlight besieges.

Outwards lies Tyrone: its working dogs,

its dreary steeples, its thousand and one

standing stones graffitied, out of plumb,

and in here the remains of a small fire

and you go further and further round

until your hands can pioneer her

wrists, her neck, her bra, her waist, her lips

a little gluey with the apricot

lip balm from the Body Shop in Castle Court.

(Enchanted Ground)

The noise of the breeze in the leaves is enormous.

The sound is the sound of an ocean

you stand at the edge of, an Atlantic unseen

with the naked eye but which you can taste

in the saltiness faint on her neck, on her breasts: