of it
To make ends mesh—
To make ends mesh— in my left hand
The cored and threaded elderberry haft,
In my right the fashioned wire,
breeze on my back,
Sun in my face, a power to bind and loose
Eked out and into each last tug and lap.
SENIOR INFANTS
1. The Sally Rod
On the main street of Granard I met Duffy
Whom I had known before the age of reason
In short trousers in the Senior Infants’ room
Where once upon a winter’s day Miss Walls
Lost her head and cut the legs off us
For dirty talk we didn’t think she’d hear.
“Well, for Jesus’ sake,” cried Duffy, coming at me
With his stick in the air and two wide open arms,
“For Jesus’ sake! D’you mind the sally rod?”
2. A Chow
I’m staring at the freshly scratched initials
Of Robert Donnelly in the sandstone coping
Of Anahorish Bridge, with Robert Donnelly
Beside me, also staring at them.
“Here,” he says,
“Have a chow of this stuff,” stripping a dulse-thin film
Off the unwrapped ounce of Warhorse Plug—
Bog-bank brown, embossed, forbidden man-fruit
He’s just been sent to buy for his father, Jock.
The roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to
At the burning-out of a neighbour, I want to lick
Bran from a bucket, grit off the coping stone.
“You have to spit,” says Robert, “a chow’s no good
Unless you spit like hell,” his ginger calf’s lick
Like a scorch of flame, his quid-spurt fulgent.
3. One Christmas Day in the Morning
Tommy Evans must be sixty now as well. The last time I saw him was at the height of the Troubles, in Phil McKeever’s pub in Castledawson, the first time we’d met since Anahorish School. I felt as free as a bird, a Catholic at large in Tommy’s airspace.
Yet something small prevailed. My father balked at a word like “Catholic” being used in company. Phil asked if we were OK. Tommy’s crowd fenced him with “What are you having, Tommy?”
I was blabbing on about guns, how they weren’t a Catholic thing, how the sight of the one in his house had always scared me, how our very toys at Christmas proved my point—when his eye upon me narrowed.
I remembered his air-gun broken over his forearm, my envy of the polished hardwood stock, him thumbing the pellets into their aperture. The snick of the thing then as he clipped it shut and danced with his eye on the sights through a quick-quick angle of ninety degrees and back, then drilled the pair of us left-right to the back of the house.
The Evans’s chicken coop was the shape of a sentry-box, walls and gable of weathered tongue-and-groove, the roofing-felt plied tight and tacked to the eaves. And there above the little neat-hinged door, balanced on the very tip of the apex, was Tommy’s target: the chrome lid of the bell of his father’s bike. Whose little zings fairly brought me to my senses.
THE NOD
Saturday evenings we would stand in line
In Loudan’s butcher shop. Red beef, white string,
Brown paper ripped straight off for parcelling
Along the counter edge. Rib roast and shin
Plonked down, wrapped up, and bow-tied neat and clean
But seeping blood. Like dead weight in a sling,
Heavier far than I had been expecting
While my father shelled out for it, coin by coin.
Saturday evenings too the local B-Men,
Unbuttoned but on duty, thronged the town,
Neighbours with guns, parading up and down,
Some nodding at my father almost past him
As if deliberately they’d aimed and missed him
Or couldn’t seem to place him, not just then.
A CLIP
Harry Boyle’s one-room, one-chimney house
With its settle bed was our first barber shop.
We’d go not for a haircut but “a clip”:
Cold smooth creeping steel and snicking scissors,
The strong-armed chair, the plain mysteriousness
Of your sheeted self inside that neck-tied
To make ends mesh—
To make ends mesh— in my left hand
The cored and threaded elderberry haft,
In my right the fashioned wire,
breeze on my back,
Sun in my face, a power to bind and loose
Eked out and into each last tug and lap.
SENIOR INFANTS
1. The Sally Rod
On the main street of Granard I met Duffy
Whom I had known before the age of reason
In short trousers in the Senior Infants’ room
Where once upon a winter’s day Miss Walls
Lost her head and cut the legs off us
For dirty talk we didn’t think she’d hear.
“Well, for Jesus’ sake,” cried Duffy, coming at me
With his stick in the air and two wide open arms,
“For Jesus’ sake! D’you mind the sally rod?”
2. A Chow
I’m staring at the freshly scratched initials
Of Robert Donnelly in the sandstone coping
Of Anahorish Bridge, with Robert Donnelly
Beside me, also staring at them.
“Here,” he says,
“Have a chow of this stuff,” stripping a dulse-thin film
Off the unwrapped ounce of Warhorse Plug—
Bog-bank brown, embossed, forbidden man-fruit
He’s just been sent to buy for his father, Jock.
The roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to
At the burning-out of a neighbour, I want to lick
Bran from a bucket, grit off the coping stone.
“You have to spit,” says Robert, “a chow’s no good
Unless you spit like hell,” his ginger calf’s lick
Like a scorch of flame, his quid-spurt fulgent.
3. One Christmas Day in the Morning
Tommy Evans must be sixty now as well. The last time I saw him was at the height of the Troubles, in Phil McKeever’s pub in Castledawson, the first time we’d met since Anahorish School. I felt as free as a bird, a Catholic at large in Tommy’s airspace.
Yet something small prevailed. My father balked at a word like “Catholic” being used in company. Phil asked if we were OK. Tommy’s crowd fenced him with “What are you having, Tommy?”
I was blabbing on about guns, how they weren’t a Catholic thing, how the sight of the one in his house had always scared me, how our very toys at Christmas proved my point—when his eye upon me narrowed.
I remembered his air-gun broken over his forearm, my envy of the polished hardwood stock, him thumbing the pellets into their aperture. The snick of the thing then as he clipped it shut and danced with his eye on the sights through a quick-quick angle of ninety degrees and back, then drilled the pair of us left-right to the back of the house.
The Evans’s chicken coop was the shape of a sentry-box, walls and gable of weathered tongue-and-groove, the roofing-felt plied tight and tacked to the eaves. And there above the little neat-hinged door, balanced on the very tip of the apex, was Tommy’s target: the chrome lid of the bell of his father’s bike. Whose little zings fairly brought me to my senses.
THE NOD
Saturday evenings we would stand in line
In Loudan’s butcher shop. Red beef, white string,
Brown paper ripped straight off for parcelling
Along the counter edge. Rib roast and shin
Plonked down, wrapped up, and bow-tied neat and clean
But seeping blood. Like dead weight in a sling,
Heavier far than I had been expecting
While my father shelled out for it, coin by coin.
Saturday evenings too the local B-Men,
Unbuttoned but on duty, thronged the town,
Neighbours with guns, parading up and down,
Some nodding at my father almost past him
As if deliberately they’d aimed and missed him
Or couldn’t seem to place him, not just then.
A CLIP
Harry Boyle’s one-room, one-chimney house
With its settle bed was our first barber shop.
We’d go not for a haircut but “a clip”:
Cold smooth creeping steel and snicking scissors,
The strong-armed chair, the plain mysteriousness
Of your sheeted self inside that neck-tied
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