Academic

School’s out for summer

School’s out forever

School’s been blown to pieces

–– Alice Cooper

Kindergarten, St. Kilian’s

A grey house lost in a big field

is ‘the German school’. Herr Schmidt’s eye-patch is real.

Herr Müller does not smile.

During break I learn how to slot together two dry

stalks of horse chestnut leaves to make

the bones of an airplane. When I try

the new noise on my tongue, it gets stuck

in my teeth, though I can count from null

to elf, and bid Guten morgen, Gute nacht ––

Merit Cards, St. Conleth’s

Stiff, with rounded edges, like invitation cards,

there are three kinds, three colours.

The best, to say you are doing good work or great,

is pink as a strawberry milkshake.

My later ones, anaemic blue, carry ‘Remarks’

such as my mother’s ‘I’d like to see higher marks.’

The rarest, iodine yellow, you can almost smell:

miching? stealing? –– one stop from being expelled.

Headmaster

There is his specially made

leather ‘biffer’ –– hand-sewn for the trade?

He calls it Lizzy, and there is a Big Lizzy too.

He has his eye on me, on you,

‘gurriers’ in our army coats of ‘bull’s wool’.

When he warns ‘There’ll be wigs on the green’

my blankness flickers, screens

some antique scuffle: a lawn, powdered rugs

flying from what must be our own heads

done up as Ladies, M’Luds.

So I am almost prepared when he brings in

a new boy (who looks already old and beaten)

and heartily invites him

to ‘tell us how many schools you’ve been expelled from.’

Science

Clear as Once Upon a Time, we arrive

at the three states of being:

Alive

Dead

Never Alive

Two Maths Teachers

Red-faced O’Byrne, rasping in his chalky cloak,

swirls and pounces. No use, something un-

clicks when numbers wink

into letters.

                   Murphy, like Groucho,

raises a clownish eyebrow:

‘I’ll tear your hides off and hang ‘em up

like strips of bacon!’

                                The blackboard is a prop

for what sizzles and smokes: entertainment, exit lines. 

Chemistry

The lovely wrongness of mercury.

I ask Paddy where we can get some, so

he asks the Japanese boy, Sato,

who escorts us into the empty lab

as if he owns it. We tip

a whole Aspirin bottle’s worth out of a tube

and before we can wonder

what to do with it, Paddy –– in secret communion

with some inner double-dare –– rolls

one of those molten heavyweight pearls

off his palm onto his tongue.

New Teacher

My coddled home-life couldn’t have prepared me

for Poole –– flushed, freckled, big as a bull,

always on the simmer. Catching me

dozing again, he puts his full weight into it

and the telephone in my left ear is ringing for weeks.

Geography

Dr Goldin (Butsy): too old, too gentle,

his heaped ashtray a caldera of crushed words.

Each time he turns, we hum behind his back

till he stops, flings the duster –– a jarring clack! ––

glares at us and erupts: ‘You pack of bastards.’

Confirmation

Of what? And how difficult could it be?

Transubstantiation? The Trinity?’

But when the soft face under the tall hat mouths

‘Who made the world?’ it wafer-melts

into its echo: the one test

you couldn’t fail to pass, or digest.

Latin

Mr Banks’ drone could not be drier

as he conjugates: amo, amas, amat…

till a terrible drought rolls in along the Tiber,

the flagons empty, love itself gone flat.

English

‘I wandered lonely…’ as Gardner (Weedy)

passing our window –– in his hands

a book held open like a breviary.

Poetry, since now and then he’ll chance

on a nugget and halt to tilt his face

at the sun: a practiced smile, radiance. 

A Reading

No matter if you’re a dosser or a swot,

when asked to read a poem aloud the protocol

is to sound like a bored robot ––

then Kinsella’s Garden on the Point

where ‘the speckled bean breaks open’ and ‘the snail

winces and waits’, and the brunt

of some odd imperative pushes me ahead

of myself, to brace my elbows, cover my ears

and read it, for once, the way it should be read.

French

Mr Feutren (Fruity) isn’t from France

but Brittany. Important. Make no mistake.

Something –– anger? passion? –– has shorn his face

to a bald, beak-nosed, hunched-electric presence.   

Yes, he fought with the SS during the war.

A Breton nationalist, why should he hide

what he believes? What he did was justified,

though I’m not sure who these justifications are for.

The Irish, so stupide! Hard to believe

how little we know, and how can we make a start

when, in restaurants, we ignore the heart

of asparagus, to nibble at the leaves.

Now he has lost patience and swoops to wrench

some slowcoach from his desk. I am in his sights

and will be next. Because of (or despite)

whatever he fled, he teaches excellent French. 

Biology

On a wall in the jacks: I am 13 and I love gees ––

‘The penis is then placed in the vagina…’ ––

breaking the seal, entering the soft-lit harem

in a smuggled Penthouse (all those misted women) ––

but when a 5^th year boy unfolds a page of these

close-ups –– cunts in lurid mugshots –– we’ve skipped

to a field manual, a dressing of wounds, ripped.

Rugger

A door swings open or shut

for good, when in the midst of it

I discover I’ve laced

my ugly, new, unbroken pair of boots

to the wrong feet.

Break

–– da-Ding, da-Ding, da-Ding       

                                                 the hand-held bell

swarms us onto the concrete, voices up

and over the high stone wall ––

Get up the yard! I’ll swop you…   Whew, just saved!

What’s white and moves quickly across the floor?

What’s the definition of agony?

Show us your steely!  I’ve heard that before.

Quickly, which would you rather be

nearly-drowned-or-nearly-saved

–– da-Ding, da-Ding, da-Ding

Coláiste na Rinne: An Interrogation*

–– Ar dhúirt tú rud mar gheall ar shite?

–– Ní dhúirt mé.

–– Dhúirt tú.

–– Ní dhúirt mé.

–– Dhúirt tú.

–– Ní dhúirt mé.

–– Dúirt!

[…]

–– Scríobh!

Prefect, Sandford Park

Lunch queue: someone shouts (his voice and face

straight out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays):

‘You! Boy! Bring me a jug of water!’

Can he be talking to me? ‘You must be joking.’

But as he looms, long and tight-lipped, I see

no joke, unless he thinks it funny

to noose my tie until I almost choke.

The Mock Leaving

What can they make of me, so studiously dreamy

I fall asleep in strict Bill Tector’s class ––

my ear tuned to nothing much at all

unless it’s the sotto voce lullaby

from the desk behind: Rooney

intoning the same Pink Floyd line

over and over: ‘the lunatic / is on the grass…’

The Leaving

I never miched before, so it feels strange;

too easy to stay in my seat as the bus pulls

away from my stop in Ranelagh, where the push

is on for the Leaving Cert. Well out of range,

I hop off, drift downstream on Grafton Street’s

quick/slow shuffling pavements, where I catch

the breath of roasted coffee beans and let

Bewley’s (The Church of Take-The-Weight-Off-Your-Feet)

inhale me. In the basement, lunch money spent

on hot milky coffee and buns, I begin to orient

myself among the tidal people, drag and flow

of conversation, places and to be or go.

For three weeks I hold this course, till I can say

I took my Leaving in Bewley’s Oriental Café.

Art School, Dún Laoghaire

Army-jacketed, smoking a roll-up, safe
in my hair –– so long I can almost sit on it ––
am I too early, too late
or somewhere in between? Time to move on
from that open-mouthed self portrait
that might be a scream or yawn.

*Footnote: Ring College: An Interrogation

–– Did you say anything about shite?

–– I didn’t.

–– You did.

–– I didn’t.

–– You did.

–– I didn’t.

–– You did!

–– Write it out!