Part 28 (1/2)

When I saw them again last night, they were two ferrets, Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field.

Field of Vision

I remember this woman who sat for years

In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing And leafing at the far end of the lane.

Straight out past the TV in the corner, The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush, The same small calves with their backs to wind and rain, The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

She was steadfast as the big window itself.

Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.

She never lamented once and she never Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

Face to face with her was an education Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones Between two whitewashed pillars, where you could see Deeper into the country than you expected And discovered that the field behind the hedge Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.

The Pitchfork

Of all implements, the pitchfork was the one

That came near to an imagined perfection: When he tightened his raised hand and aimed with it, It felt like a javelin, accurate and light.

So whether he played the warrior or the athlete Or worked in earnest in the chaff and sweat, He loved its grain of tapering, dark-flecked ash Grown satiny from its own natural polish.

Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain, Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen.

Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted.

The springiness, the clip and dart of it.

And then when he thought of probes that reached the farthest, He would see the shaft of a pitchfork sailing past Evenly, imperturbably through s.p.a.ce, Its p.r.o.ngs starlit and absolutely soundless But has learned at last to follow that simple lead Past its own aim, out to an other side Where perfection or nearness to it is imagined Not in the aiming but the opening hand.

The Settle Bed

Willed down, waited for, in place at last and for good.

Trunk-hasped, cart-heavy, painted an ignorant brown.

And pew-strait, bin-deep, standing four-square as an ark.

If I lie in it, I am cribbed in seasoned deal Dry as the unkindled boards of a funeral s.h.i.+p.

My measure has been taken, my ear shuttered up.

Yet I hear an old sombre tide awash in the headboard: Unpathetic och ochs and och hohs, the long bedtime Sigh-life of Ulster, unwilling, unbeaten, Protestant, Catholic, the Bible, the beads, Late talks at gables by moonlight, boots on the hearth, The small hours chimed sweetly away so next thing it was The c.o.c.k on the ridge-tiles.

And now this is 'an inheritance'

Upright, rudimentary, uns.h.i.+ftably planked In the long long ago, yet willable forward Again and again and again, cargoed with Its own dumb, tongue-and-groove worthiness And un-get-roundable weight. But to conquer that weight, Imagine a dower of settle beds tumbled from heaven Like some nonsensical vengeance come on the people, Then learn from that harmless barrage that whatever is given Can always be reimagined, however four-square, Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time It happens to be. You are free as the lookout, That far-seeing joker posted high over the fog, Who declared by the time that he had got himself down The actual s.h.i.+p had stolen away from beneath him.

from Glanmore Revisited

I SCRABBLE.

in memoriam Tom Delaney, archaeologist

Bare flags. Pump water. Winter-evening cold.

Our backs might never warm up but our faces Burned from the hearth-blaze and the hot whiskeys.