and amid the clang of bucklers, a hundred

harps aflutter, the Great O’Neill was crowned

atop the hill of Ireland’s Youth . . . You grin

and lie flat out, shaded, lit, assuaged, watching

sky and supple leaf-print, holding and defending

nothing but the unzipped and unstrapped pitch-

perfect one beside you humming something

by the Smiths and tracing lightly cursive

shapes with a finger on your inside wrist.

A dandelion seed slides along its rill of air

and rises and rises and passes from sight.

Home is only one depiction of reality

and there are others, yes, but this is mine.

I look out from two nail-holes six feet up.

Most of my skin is lacking nerve endings

and my hearing’s much worse than the dog’s but –

(Mr Implacable)

as to how I might attest to presence –

that thing lit and extraordinary –

I would cite the not infrequent

visits of the dandelion seed, aloft, adrift,

proceeding, streeling above Paradise,

ten thousand houses of the saddest news

where the lion’s tooth, unloosed, brings

the same sensations of translucency

I experienced a lot on Zoloft and vodka

or Zispin and whiskey

and in certain passages of Ammons

or Edmund Burke or Wallace Stevens.

(Country of Conceit)

Here or there in the Benthic dip or cloud

conjecture I don’t think I’m exactly lost

but I couldn’t, at this juncture, point due north,

or tell you if the ground below the paving

underneath my dealer boots is clay or sand

or rock, or what phase the moon is in.

(In phonetics a ‘juncture’ is the set

of features that let a listener detect

a word or phrase boundary, which means

distinguishing between, say, I scream

and Ice cream. It is a tiny interstice

but I am persistent, and it fits

(Porter Watchful)

since I kept beneath my bed a bayonet

from Passchendaele and a Reader’s Digest

telescope wrapped up in a scout blanket

bedizened with embroidered badges

designating all the other youngsters

stationed at their outposts, ready.

The spyglass, enamelled navy, plastic-

capped with black, offered up the prolonged drop

into the cosmic well wherein there shone not

a single pebble of quartz in the depths

but hundreds and thousands and millions

all glittering and still insisting.)

(House of the Interpreter)

Marilyn-obsessive and ex-brickie

my cheerfully miscast Reverend Twomey

gave me the lend of the Flashman series,

his Ed McBains and Modesty Blaises

and I would devour them under cover

with a dying torch or in the summer

with the curtains left ajar, just a touch –

before I’d slide back out to readjust

and readjust their patterning of Spiderman

so it didn’t seem too like a spider,

or a man, that dutiful dead-eyed intruder

whose desperate extended hands . . .

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

and Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man

salvaged from the Save the Children.

(Mr Self-Will)

My Dad gave me a biography of one

Willie John MacBride, not the drunk vain

murderous lout but Ireland’s lock from Toome,