Part 4 (1/2)

Was a centre, birch trunks Ghosting your bearings, Improvising charmed rings Wherever you stopped.

Though you walked a straight line It might be a circle you travelled With toadstools and stumps Always repeating themselves.

Or did you re-pa.s.s them?

Here were bleyberries quilting the floor, The black char of a fire, And having found them once You were sure to find them again.

Someone had always been there Though always you were alone.

Lovers, birdwatchers, Campers, gypsies and tramps Left some trace of their trades Or their excrement.

Hedging the road so It invited all comers To the hush and the mush Of its whispering treadmill, Its limits defined, So they thought, from outside.

They must have been thankful For the hum of the traffic If they ventured in Past the picnickers' belt Or began to recall Tales of fog on the mountains.

You had to come back To learn how to lose yourself, To be pilot and stray witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

Bann Clay

Labourers pedalling at ease

Past the end of the lane Were white with it. Dungarees And boots wore its powdery stain.

All day in open pits They loaded on to the bank Slabs like the squared-off clots Of a blue cream. Sunk For centuries under the gra.s.s, It baked white in the sun, Relieved its h.o.a.rded waters And began to ripen.

It underruns the valley, The first slow residue Of a river finding its way.

Above it, the webbed marsh is new, Even the clutch of Mesolithic Flints. Once, cleaning a drain I shovelled up livery slicks Till the water gradually ran Clear on its old floor.

Under the humus and roots This smooth weight. I labour Towards it still. It holds and gluts.

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.

b.u.t.ter sunk under More than a hundred years Was recovered salty and white.

The ground itself is kind, black b.u.t.ter 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.

from WINTERING OUT (1972)

Fodder

Or, as we said,

fother, I open my arms for it again. But first to draw from the tight vise of a stack the weathered eaves of the stack itself falling at your feet, last summer's tumbled swathes of gra.s.s and meadowsweet multiple as loaves and fishes, a bundle tossed over half-doors or into mucky gaps.

These long nights I would pull hay for comfort, anything to bed the stall.

Bog Oak

A carter's trophy