Part 17 (1/2)

Sloe Gin

The clear weather of juniper

darkened into winter.

She fed gin to sloes and sealed the gla.s.s container.

When I unscrewed it I smelled the disturbed tart stillness of a bush rising through the pantry.

When I poured it it had a cutting edge and flamed like Betelgeuse.

I drink to you in smoke-mirled, blue- black sloes, bitter and dependable.

Chekhov on Sakhalin for Derek Mahon

So, he would pay his 'debt to medicine'.

But first he drank cognac by the ocean With his back to all he had travelled there to face.

His head was swimming free as the troikas Of Tyumen, he looked down from the rail Of his thirty years and saw a mile Into himself as if he were clear water: Lake Baikal from the deckrail of the steamer.

So far away, Moscow was like lost youth.

And who was he, to savour in his mouth Fine spirits that the puzzled literati Packed off with him to a penal colony Him, born, you may say, under the counter?

At least that meant he knew its worth. No cantor In full throat by the iconostasis Got holier joy than he got from that gla.s.s That shone and warmed like diamonds warming On some pert young cleavage in a salon, Inviolable and affronting.

He felt the gla.s.s go cold in the midnight sun.

When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones It rang as clearly as the convicts' chains That haunted him. All through the months to come It rang on like the burden of his freedom To try for the right tone not tract, not thesis And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze His slave's blood out and waken the free man Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.

Sandstone Keepsake

It is a kind of chalky russet

solidified gourd, sedimentary and so reliably dense and bricky I often clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.

It was ruddier, with an underwater hint of contusion, when I lifted it, wading a s.h.i.+ngle beach on Inishowen.

Across the estuary light after light came on silently round the perimeter of the camp. A stone from Phlegethon, bloodied on the bed of h.e.l.l's hot river?

Evening frost and the salt water made my hand smoke, as if I'd plucked the heart that d.a.m.ned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood but not really, though I remembered his victim's heart in its casket, long venerated.

Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers from my free state of image and allusion, swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars: a silhouette not worth bothering about, out for the evening in scarf and waders and not about to set times wrong or right, stooping along, one of the venerators.

from Shelf Life

Granite Chip

Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.

Saying An union in the cup I'll throw I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around this bit hammered off Joyce's Martello Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant I keep but feel little in common with a kind of stone-age circ.u.mcising knife, a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.

Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive and exacting. Come to me, it says all you who labour and are burdened, I will not refresh you. And it adds, Seize the day. And, You can take me or leave me.

Old Smoothing Iron

Often I watched her lift it

from where its compact wedge rode the back of the stove like a tug at anchor.

To test its heat she'd stare and spit in its iron face or hold it up next her cheek to divine the stored danger.