builds and then, across the chancel, a slant account

occurs – and when those other voices enter

it is like water meeting water

which forces some new channel open in

the mind – silvers, slivers, shafts and ribbons,

countershafts and anabranch, rills and winterbourne –

and each discrete human voice uncaps

a separate grade of light so when the counter-

tenor rests for four beats on the top C

you fall slightly upwards and desire to be clean.

(Valley of the Shadow)

David, it’s been twenty years

and I hardly remember your face.

Your tremendous hair I do remember,

a kind of feather-cut highlighted mullet,

and your taste for the shoe-string leather-thong

neckties favoured by Mexican cattlemen.

The clip-clop of your cowboy boots.

The fury all goes somewhere and I’m sorry

about this. You were always a bit

self-conscious – as I was, and as I am

starting in the bar, fourteen and withdrawn

and gangly, and you’re patient enough

with changing the barrels and cleaning the lines.

You banged on about the outback’s open

endless roads, the shimmering heat and the red light

and the absolutely empty desert,

but you were only travelling back from Omagh

with the others, dayshifting with a roofer.

Our windows pulsed once, twice, but didn’t break.

You had the right firmness, could make a joke

and still say no, and had grown stout enough

to be thumped or hugged or roughhoused

by any drunk at the weddings we’d do –

that we did – but you couldn’t handle this.

When I drove past the brass plaque the last time

I saw some

had defaced it with a marker pen again.

(Giant Despair)

After that sustained top C you’re jittery

as a compass needle, until the plainsong

starts again and the choruses are calling

forth responses from the other side:

the singing has the force of argument,

though since the final verse is sung by

(Man in an Iron Cage)

both choirs in harmony, an argument

concluding in something shared and singular,

like sleep or being human, subject

to that death – and why coax us in like that God?

Why the bait, the switch, the ambuscade?

(From the Latin, to place in a wood).

Writing it down or performing it elsewhere

meant excommunication: this is dream

logic. In mine, a family gathering.

I mean the family plot. I mean two down

from Allingham at St Anne’s in Ballyshannon.

Mise Eire. Meh! Deuce.

(Mr Enmity)

In Cookstown once upon a time

a Church of Ireland schoolboy trudging home

did cross the road and pass the chapel gates

and cross himself and pass into the cracked

looking-glass where he felt safe and oddly dangerous.

For many years my nemesis was Fergus

who waited like a suitor in the afternoon

after school with his lot by the bus stop.

I was tall for the fourth form and thin

and wore the wrong uniform for him.

As did he for me. Like MacBride.

Both of them! This is becoming a theme!