The Leaving, 1973*

I never miched before, so it feels strange,
too easy to stay in my seat as the bus pulls
away from my stop (Sandford Park, 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 sat for my Leaving in Bewley’s Oriental Café.


*for Shakespeare on his 448th birthday
who understood 
the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school

Coincidence

Found among my mother's papers,  little card 
less than one inch by two. But thick

and sturdy (a whole generation, a world in that sturdiness).

In clear black print on a battered cream background, the following:

Arrow points to your CORRECT weight

ONLY IF you stand still on platform until

red hand stops before dropping coin.

And the purple-stamped date: 13 APR   which, as it happens, is today’s date

how long (half a century?) later. To the right of this ––

below the bold printed Stones Pounds –– a purple arrow points

at the inch-tape figures, in between 2-6 and 2-7.

And below this, in bigger bolder letters:

THE BRITISH AUTOMATIC  Company, Ltd.,

14 APPOLD STREET, LONDON, E.C. 2. 

O city of my birth, where was she coming from, or going,

what was on her mind, was I pestering her, did she need a pause

in the rhythm of her walking, what made her stop in the quietness

or busyness of a London street to weigh (two-year-old me, presumably)

and slip this into her handbag –– evidence for the jury

who weighs it now standing on the floor, the platform

of her cleared-out bedroom

where he waits for the red hand, the arrow, to stop quivering.

Sketches of My Mother

In the top drawer, so different from

the soft, neatly folded clothes: her necklaces ––

pearls and beads, the pink coral

trickle and click through my fingers –– feel

the precise weight of the tangle

of memory and dream.

*

Fatherless, my secret terror

is that some abrupt power may snatch her, freeze

my panicked ten-year-old stare through the windscreen

(for almost a whole half hour)

at the corner of the shopping centre where

she must reappear –– now! –– so my world can snap back.

*

Just once, at her dressing table, pawed

by my anxiety (‘but are you really

my mother or, or…’)

she swings round a scary-alien-face: ‘Ha!’

*

Her gentleness scales down the fear

of girls –– women with all their marvelous difference

never too strange or too far.

*

Yet sex is part of the great

unspoken, an ‘information’ booklet: blotchy

grey and white photos, the girl’s pubescent v

retouched to a modest blur ––

like her life-drawings, the shapes

worried and tentative, furred.

I will have to find that bare continuous line

for myself.

*

Her eye is for colours lifted

from an Irish landscape –– mossy and warm ––

or seascapes, like one she sketched

from the deck of a boat towing

yellowy moonlit waves, the African coast’s

mountains, taller than Dublin’s

and inset with pale cities: our day trip

from Torremolinos to Tangiers

receding as we watched, at home between continents.

*

Innocence, yes, though neither naïve nor saintly ––

a working part of her instinct: second eldest

in a family of seven, calm

at the eye of the tantrum: ‘Oh,

I was always the peacemaker’.

*

The heavy-headed roses have grown

dishevelled, swaying above her

as she stoops with secateurs

among straight, woody stems, extravagant thorns,

burying, I once pompously wrote,

‘her regret’ (At what? Not having lived

a more ordered or wildly-lived life? Not being sure

of herself or what she should do?).

More likely just pleasuring, becoming lost in

velvety pinks, creams, carmines

curling like old photographs

tattered and edged here and there

with tea-brown stains.

*

In a narrow alcove above her bed, plyboard shelves

sag a little, like hammocks, under the weight

of her cluster of books: Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs,

Belloc, Betjeman, A Child’s Garden of Verses,

Winnie The Pooh, The Larousse Encyclopaedia

of Greek Mythology, a Dream Dictionary (that warns

against dreams about weddings: funerals

in disguise), James’s Michener’s Iberia:

grown-up black and white photographs

of hot dust, sharp shadows, blood, sweat, age.

What else? The Wind In The Willows, Leaves of Grass.

*

Searching her room for Photoplay or She ––

glossies that might (unlike the monochrome Lady)

reveal a lucky breast, I lift the mattress

and find a Cosmopolitan that unfolds

a naked, hairy Burt Reynolds (his flashy grin

sporting a bent cigarillo) on a bearskin,

one elbow propped on the white-fanged muzzle,

a protective forearm lax between his thighs.

A man, masculine and vulnerable, absurd

as my own pink fantasies, the TV ad:

 ‘…and all because the lady loves Milk Tray’ ––

her long-vanished brand of cigarette, Kingsway

(a white pack with a red ribbon and gold crown),

her style –– the way she wore scarves, belts, slacks,

touches of elegance, flourishes, grace-notes

on a graph of yearning, how high and how far  ––

thirty years to celebrate, to love her

for making ‘a little something’ of her own desire.

*

There was Pound’s Fascist rant:

‘Oh how hideous it is

To see three generations of one house gathered together!

It is like an old tree with shoots

And with some branches rotted and falling.’

Then Raymond Carver’s (quieter, more honest) ‘Fear

of having to live with my mother in her old age

and mine’

                and here we are, and the greater fears

go blundering past like gale-force

window-rattling golems, far

too overblown to get a foot in the door.

*

As the home-help women help

my mother out of her clothes

and, if she can make it,

onto the shower stool,

some stay silent, while others

sprinkle a few words, names

like Darling or Dear. I think

she prefers the names. I do.

They drive from M50 estates ––

Clonee, Tyrrelstown, Blanchardstown,

late of that dusty-green cloak

of a continent –– carrying

the business of the world

helping, into our home.

And their own names sound like endearments –

Ola, Ayesha and the one

who is coming on Wednesday: Purity.

*

An afterlife: arthritic, room-bound

with one of our cats, Claire, Hillary, Toby…

comfortably draped on the TV’s

sleepy cornet of Coronation Street

or The Antiques Roadshow

while a bright patch of winter sun dulls

the orange coals: ‘Is it bad today?’

                                                      ‘Ah yes,

singing in my bones.’

*

But I remain wary of this

premature mourning, however inevitable,

admiring her doggedness, how on that slow train

boarded at the end of the first World War,

her ‘proper’ age never arrived,

so, at 93 (with her two sisters

nearest in age gone like supporting walls),

she confides as if for the first time:

‘It’s hard getting old.’

*

She’s driving a little too fast, as if we didn’t have

this whole day to tunnel through –

high-hedged shuttle of fields, hills, sky

a ladder of cloud-ribs, shadow-flits. She smiles

at something I can’t guess and the road rises

and plunges steep enough for a gulp

of vertigo as the canopy unzips and I see

ahead, slate-blue roughed with white, some cove

we visited so long ago I remember

the nested stones, cool sand. She turns to me

with that smile and makes it mine.

The above is excerpted from a loose sequence I was working on when she died last February. It feels odd to post this, a bit transgressive, almost a violation. I remember Philippe Jaccottet's visceral disgust (expressed in a poem of his) at the very notion of a writer bringing specific biographical details concerning a loved one, or anyone close to him/her, into a poem. But then I also remember Patrick Kavanagh's lovely poem in memory of his mother: 

'O you are not lying in the wet clay,
For it is a harvest evening now and we
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight
And you smile up at us - eternally.' 

Or there is Heaney's poem from his (not at all loose) sequence of 'Clearances', about remembering peeling potatoes with his mother while he attended her death-bed: 

'So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives–
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.' 

So there are certainly precedents, not that I can ever measure up to them.

In any case, Happy Mother's Day mum.

An Eventful Horizon

Last night I stayed up too late watching an Horizon programme I'd recorded, 'Who's Afraid Of A Big Black Hole?' Some stuff I've read or heard of before, such as that super-massive mother at the heart of our (and every other) galaxy. Various scientists (physicists, astronomers...) spoke about how black holes are still the big question, the place where the laws of nature break down, where quantum mechanics (the science of the very small) meets gravity head-on. One Asian physicist with leonine white hair declared that the physics of black holes had to somehow incorporate infinity (that toppled, recumbent figure of eight dreaming its twisted dreams), which was 'a nightmare' (and not just one infinity/nightmare, but an infinite string of them). But you could tell that he was delighted by this, the nightmare was a whopping good one, maybe the best ever, and this relish was evident in the smiles and voices of everyone they interviewed. People who (rather unimaginatively) imagine that scientists are cold, cut-and-dried Grangrinds or statistic-spouting caricatures, should be made watch this kind of programme. I wish I had the brain to follow it all but I don't care. I LOVE this shit. As DH Lawrence put it:

I like relativity and quantum theories

because I don't understand them

and they make me feel as if space shifted about

like a swan that can't settle,

refusing to sit still and be measured;

and as if the atom were an impulsive thing

always changing its mind. 

So far, the only poem I've written in which a black hole features is the following, a short comic sequence:

Navels

A good thing to gaze at: your lover’s 

thimble of dark.

.

See you at two, at the deep-shallow pool.

.

Vestibule

for nothing more than the tip

of a finger or tongue, graze 

of a stranger’s guiltless eye. 

.

A mystery: the way yours is a magnet for fluff.

.

Everyone to their own

free-floating punctuation. 

.

In the window of the tattoo parlour, a photo

of a sailor’s encircled by boot-prints 

and the words Navel Patrol

.

Forget the skewered eyebrow or chin, 

the silver stitch in the lip, 

the harpooned tongue.

Here’s the best place for sinking

that re-engagement ring.

.

Stop looking at me there.

It tickles.

.

Maybe to say: I exist ––

last of the bathwater’s dervish, 

bullseye

at the heart of the galaxy –– a well-spun 

birth-story with a twist.

.

Naba, nabel, navik, 

pupak, pupek, pusat, puseg, pusod, 

pito, piko, vico, ombelico, ombligo, 

umbigo, umbilicus,

innie, outie; this ––

mammal-mark, shared scar ––

remembers

Sheila Granier: March 10th 1918 –– February 16th 2012

My mother died at ten past one this afternoon, in a nursing home in Dalkey. She was 93. Euphemisms aside, her 'passing' actually was peaceful. Over the last decade her osteoarthritis had worsened; she had become house-bound, then room-bound, then essentially chair-bound, her world shrinking. Recently she began to have trouble eating and drinking. She was very frail. They had moved her to a private room around two weeks ago.  My wife and seven-year-old son had just called in to see her. I think she knew they were there. She was able to make small sounds of acknowledgement and to respond when her hand was squeezed.

After they left, I was sitting holding her hand when I realised there was a change; her breathing, which had been fast and shallow, was slowing. Her hand was unresponsive, lax. I called in the nearest person I could find, who happened to be Alice, the marvelous woman who runs the place. She brought in a couple of nurses, who were both efficient and warm, truly caring professionals (despite the fact that this would obviously be routine for them).

I could barely speak at first. One of the nurses brought me a cup of tea. I kept looking at mum, detecting phantom movements, as if she was still breathing, then I'd glance out the window at the view I have become so accustomed to, a row of neat, shingled bungalows running uphill along a little footpath beside the nursing home: back-gardens with wind still tousling the cabbage palms, blurry pale blue rips in the rushing clouds, inexorable life.

My wife and cousins (who also happen to be close friends) have been brilliant. Arrangements, phone calls, etc. have been made. I am writing this now partly because I am unsure what else to do with myself.

Mum was second eldest in a family of seven. She often said she was always 'the peacemaker'. She never married and I grew up with my grandparents. Though I believe she was a popular and stylish young woman, by the time she settled in Dublin her circle of friends became small, mostly family (two sisters lived nearby). As her parents aged, she became their carer, as, eventually, I became hers. She was a very loving mother, immensely kind and gentle. And now the world is minus her. 

Embracing Dickens (on his 200th birthday)

In Nabokov's book, Lectures On Literature, Bleak House follows Mansfield Park. He introduces Dickens with an almost audible rubbing of hands:


We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens.  We are now ready to           bask in Dickens.  In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort to join the ladies in the drawing room.  In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port. [end of quote]


Like Nabokov's, T.S. Eliot's enthusiasm is infectious. He introduces Bleak House with the following passage, which I have sometimes used to demonstrate prose rhythm in creative writing classes:


London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might say, for the death of the sun. Dogs, indistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better, splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. [end of quote]


There's a swatch of The Waste Land here. That one-word opening sentence reminds me of  the the first line of The Burial of the Dead, whose short, incantatory 'Unreal city' is due to Pound's surgical excision (the original wishy-washy opening was: 'Unreal city, I have sometimes seen and see...').


Another Dickens passage I love is from Little Dorrit, a marvelous description of funereal church bells tolling over thousands of houses (or 'lairs'), 'frowning as heavily on the streets they composed, as if they were every one inhabited by the ten young men of the Calender's story, who blackened their faces and bemoaned their miseries every night.':

Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the year. As the hour
approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating. At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church,
Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They WON'T come, they WON'T come, they WON'T come! At the five minutes, it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood
for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair.

'Thank Heaven!' said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell stopped. [end of quote]

The playfulness –– those touches of grim, anthropomorphic humour –– are pure Dickens, bible-black but illuminated with what Tobias Wolff' called 'synaptic lightning.' 

My grandfather didn't offer me tawny port when he had me sit beside him each day to to read aloud large doses of David Copperfield. These sessions took place in the dining room, with its oversized oak table. The drawing room might have been preferable, as it was at the south-facing front of the house and therefore warmer. But grandmother might be there, sitting by the gas fire watching TV or in her rocking chair in the bay window. Whereas the dining room, in between meals, was grandfather's domain, his smoldering-coal-fire-cigar-scented refuge. Such dutiful readings might have put me off Dickens, though it's more likely they fed my burgeoning appetite for exhibitionism (or performance –– if I was less lazy I might have had a proper try at acting). In any case, I am grateful to grandfather, and to Dickens, so happy birthday!

NB: The picture above is one of Doré's engravings, from his book, London, A Pilgrimage (Dover Pictorial Archives)

For Holocaust Memorial Day

Stolpersteine*

Someone is at work, prising out paving stones.

The work looks proper, official, though he is wearing

a cement-dusted leather cowboy hat.

Someone has made space for something, a little block capped

with brass, a square palm-print outside one

of the houses of the nameless.

Someone has done his homework: HIER WOHNTE _____

a name, date, whatever’s available and

can be packed.

Someone has hammered in, punched each letter and number,

each dent in the silence of the clean sheet,

each word ringing with blows.

Someone has laid it in your tracks, something to stumble on:

a street testing its voice, ghost of a shine,

blind spot flickering off.

*‘Stumbling Blocks’:  German artist Gunter Demnig’s ongoing project: memorialising those murdered in the Holocaust by setting plaques outside the houses they originally lived in. His website is www  dot stolpersteine dot com

Superstition & Sentimentality vs Childhood

Father (seeing a magpie): Hello Mr Magpie, and how's Mrs Magpie?
Child: Hello Mr I'm Going-To-Kill-You, and how's Mrs I'm-Going-To-Kill-You?

'I'm The The King Of The Castle'

After school, I took the wean to visit mum in the nursing home in Dalkey. This has become our routine now, since she  became too weak to bring home around a fortnight ago. She has recovered considerably, enough to have short conversations.

Before returning to the car, I waited for him to do his sprint up the steep little path to the railway bridge behind the nursing home (this is an older, more established routine, really a tradition). He shouted his old war-cry, then began again and interrupted himself, thus:

'I'm the king of the ca... I'm the king of nothing at all cos I'm just a kid.'

Not that this knowledge seemed to faze him. Just something he needed to get off his chest.

(photo, taken near the nursing home, shows the castle on the rim of Dalkey hill in the lower left corner)

Pearse Hutchinson's 'Watching The Morning Grow'

I read Pearse Hutchinson's obituary in this morning's Irish Times, having first learnt of his death a couple of days ago (Ian Duhig posted one of Hutchinson's poems as a tribute on Facebook). 


When I first began to write poetry in the 1970s, Pearse Hutchinson was an important discovery. His poems meant a great deal to me, and still do. In 2006 Peter Sirr, who was editing Poetry Ireland Review at the time, asked a number of poets to select a 'crucial' poetry collection to write about, one that had had a significant influence on their work. I chose Pearse Hutchinson's 1972 collection, Watching The Morning Grow. The essay I wrote (first published in PIR 87 in August 2006) is reprinted below:


In the early 1970s I discovered the Eblana Bookshop, near the top of Grafton Street. Inside, poetry was the Good News; the latest publications were arranged near the door, on the ‘altar’: tiers of narrow shelves designed to prop them with the covers facing out, like a display of pamphlets inside a church.

My school poetry anthology, Exploring English 2, had given me a tantalising glimpse of contemporary Irish poetry in Thomas Kinsella. But browsing these shelves I came across, for the first time, such poets as Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin, Michael Hartnett, and later, from across the water, Philip Larkin’s High Windows.

The first collection I bought was Pearse Hutchinson’s Watching The Morning Grow. The cover was striking, a boldly emblematic flower linocut –– appropriate, since flowers are a recurring and important motif.

Heaney has described Hutchinson’s poems as ‘first footers, coming to the reader with personal news to tell, keeping him “in the presence of flesh and blood”.’ The news was certainly personal, candid too. Watching The Morning Grow broached feelings I had yet to come to terms with: the underrated importance of friendship, gentleness and human warmth, openness to other cultures and people, an invigorating  sense of solidarity with anyone brave enough to do or say something that rang true.

The first two stanzas of the opening poem, ‘Ringing the changes on Mistral’, recall a local custom, whereby a child was brought round the neighbours, given

a couple of eggs,

a cut of bread,

a grain of salt,

and a match-stick,

and told to be

as full as an egg,

as good as bread,

wise like salt,

straight as a match.

As with some of the other poems, it is like a little prayer, exhortation or memo to the poet (and, by implication, to the reader).

Hutchinson is comfortably at home in several languages, among them Irish, French, German, Spanish, Catalan and Rumanian.  In a poem like ‘Ode to the Future’ this linguistic freedom, and the array of characters from different cultures and countries who make brief, epiphanic appearances and utterances, could seem rather bewildering to a monolinguist such as myself. But the rhythm was never less than compelling,  and the voice trustworthy, someone for whom these languages were pulsing, alive. As ‘Ode to the Future’ puts it:

“whenever I smell a rose I hear / a trandafír breathing”  (trandafír being Rumanian for rose).

The second poem in the book, ‘Gaeltacht’, made inroads in my imagination that remain to this day. It begins:

Bartley Costello, eighty years old,

sat in his silver-grey tweeds on a kitchen chair,

at his door in Carraroe, the sea only yards away,

smoking a pipe, with a pint of porter beside his boot

The portrait, from pipe to boot – taking in the sea – is startlingly complete. I am reminded now of other iconic portraits, from Montague’s poem, ‘Like Dolmens Round My Childhood, The Old People’ or Mahon’s “lamplighters, sail-makers and native Manx speakers” from ‘A Dying Art’ (another of those first, inroad-making poems).

Some of the most memorable phrases are delivered in Irish (translations given in the notes at the end of the book). As one of the characters says, ‘Labhraim le stráinséiri. Credim gur choir bheith ag labhairt le stráinséirí.’ (I speak with strangers. I believe it’s right to be speaking with strangers). Here was my country as I had never experienced it: exotic yet down-to-earth, a dream-territory that did not seem too out of reach to come to terms with; and the Irish language  (that had sent me to sleep in school), out in the open, free of chalk-dust and nationalism.

Perhaps my favourite poem from the collection is the third last, one of the apparently simplest, ‘Bright After Dark’. Each of the three stanzas is a vivid bat-swoop into a different country, unnamed except in the notes at the back of the book. Superstitions are relayed as facts, thus:

In the first country,

what you must do when the cow stops giving milk

is climb, after dark, a certain hill,

and play the flute: to kill your scheming neighbour’s curse.

If you can find a silver flute to play,

the spell will break all the faster, the surer.   

But silver is not essential.    But: the job must

be done after dark:

otherwise, it won’t work.

It isn’t always necessary to ‘load every rift with ore’. What makes this work, what gives it its rhythm and hypnotic music, is its prosaic, halting, matter-of-factness. Even the odd punctuation plays a part: those colons, like dramatic pauses.

If, as Helen Vendler suggests, poetry ‘insists on a spooling, a form of repetition, the reinscribing of a groove’, ‘Bright After Dark’ embodies that movement in each stanza, each country, each setting-out. And it ends perfectly, with a directive to ‘…drop / grains of maize for whoever comes after you: / for only maize can light the way on a dark night.’ So the poem’s talismanic brightness shifts from incantatory music to cinder/guardian angel and finishes in an imaginary ellipsis, a trail of light-seeds.

Hutchinson’s collection was one of the first that gently but firmly shook me, and woke me up.

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!