in whose memory they offer every year six of their best milch cows,
of the Bard of Ballymacarrett,
of every ungodly poet in his or her godly garret,
of Medhbh and Michael and Frank and Ciaran and ‘wee’ John Qughes.
Of the Belfast school, so called, of the school of hard knocks,
of your fervent eschewal of stockings and socks
as you set out to hunt down your foes
as implacably as the tóraidheacht through the Fews
of Redmond O’Hanlon, of how that ‘d’ and that ‘c’ aspirate
in tóraidheacht make it sound like a last gasp in an oxygentent,
of your refusal to open a vent
but to breathe in spirit of salt, the mordant salt-spirit.
Of how mordantly hydrochloric acid must have scored and scarred,
of the claim that boiled skirrets
can cure the spitting of blood, of that dank
flat somewhere off Morehampton Road, of the unbelievable stink
of valerian or feverfew simmering over a low heat,
of your sitting there, pale and gaunt,
with that great prescriber of boiled skirrets, Dr John Arbuthnot,
your face in a bowl of feverfew, a towel over your head.
Of the great roll of paper like a bolt of cloth
running out again and again like a road at the edge of a cliff,
of how you called a Red Admiral a Red
Admirable, of how you were never in the red
on either the first or the last
of the month, of your habit of loosing the drawstring of your purse
and finding one scrunched-up, obstreperous
note and smoothing it out and holding it up, pristine and pellucid.
Of how you spent your whole life with your back to the wall,
of your generosity when all the while
you yourself lived from hand
to mouth, of Joseph Beuys’s pack of hounds
crying out from their felt and fat ‘Atone, atone, atone’,
of Watt remembering the ‘Krak! Krek! Krik!’
of those three frogs’ karaoke
like the still, sad basso continuo of the great quotidian.
Of a ground bass of sadness, yes, but also a sennet of hautboys
as the fat and felt hounds of Beuys O’Beuys
bayed at the moon over a caravan
in Dunmore East, I’m pretty sure it was, or Dungarvan:
of my guest appearance in your self-portrait not as a hidalgo
from a long line
of hidalgos but a hound-dog, a leanbh,
a dog that skulks in the background, a dog that skulks and stalks.
Of that self-portrait, of the self-portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn,
of all that’s revelation, all that’s rune,
of all that’s composed, all composed of odds and ends,
of that daft urge to make amends
when it’s far too late, too late even to make sense of the clutter
of false trails and reversed horseshoe tracks
and the aniseed we took it in turn to drag
across each other’s scents, when only a fish is dumber and colder.
Of your avoidance of canned goods, in the main,
on account of the exceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedingly high risk of ptomaine,
of corned beef in particular being full of crap,
of your delight, so, in eating a banana as ceremoniously as Krapp
but flinging the skin over your shoulder like a thrush
flinging off a shell from which it’s only just managed to disinter
a snail, like a stone-faced, twelfth-century
FitzKrapp eating his banana by the mellow, yellow light of a rush.
Of the ‘Yes, let’s go’ spoken by Monsieur Tarragon,
of the early-ripening jardonelle, the tumorous jardon, the jargon
of jays, the jars
of tomato relish and the jars
of Victoria plums, absolutely de rigueur for a passable plum baba,
of the drawers full of balls of twine and butcher’s string,
of Dire Straits playing ‘The Sultans of Swing’,
of the horse’s hock suddenly erupting in those boils and buboes.
Of the Greek figurine of a pig, of the pig on a terracotta frieze,
of the sow dropping dead from some mysterious virus,
of your predilection for gammon
served with a sauce of coriander or cumin,
of the slippery elm, of the hornbeam or witch-, or even wych-,
hazel that’s good for stopping a haemorrhage
in mid-flow, of the merest of mere
hints of elderberry curing everything from sciatica to a stitch.
Of the decree condemnator, the decree absolvitor, the decree nisi,
of Aosdána, of an chraobh cnuais,
of the fields of buckwheat
taken over by garget, inkberry, scoke – all names for pokeweed –
of Mother Courage, of Arturo Ui,
of those Sunday mornings spent picking at sesame
noodles and all sorts and conditions of dim sum,
of tea and ham sandwiches in the Nesbitt Arms hotel in Ardara.
Of the day your father came to call, of your leaving your sickroom
in what can only have been a state of delirium,
of how you simply wouldn’t relent
from your vision of a blind
watch-maker, of your fatal belief that fate
governs everything from the honey-rust of your father’s terrier’s
eyebrows to the horse that rusts and rears
in the furrow, of the furrows from which we can no more deviate
than they can from themselves, no more than the map of Europe
can be redrawn, than that Hermes might make a harp from his harpe,
than that we must live in a vale
of tears on the banks of the Lagan or the Foyle,
than that what we have is a done deal,
than that the Irish Hermes,
Lugh, might have leafed through his vast herbarium
for the leaf that had it within it, Mary, to anoint and anneal,
than that Lugh of the Long Arm might have found in the midst of lus
na leac or lus na treatha or Frannc-lus,
in the midst of eyebright, or speedwell, or tansy, an antidote,
than that this Incantata
might have you look up from your plate of copper or zinc
on which you’ve etched the row upon row
of army-worms, than that you might reach out, arrah,
and take in your ink-stained hands my own hands stained with ink.
PAUL MULDOON
Inglan is a Bitch
w’en mi jus’ come to Landan toun
mi use to work pan di andahgroun
but workin’ pan di andahgroun
y’u don’t get fi know your way aroun’
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no runnin’ whey fram it
mi get a lickle jab in a big ’otell
an’ awftah a while, mi woz doin’ quite well
dem staat mi aaf as a dish-washah
but w’en mi tek a stack, mi noh tun clack-watchah!
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
noh baddah try fi hide fram it
w’en dem gi’ you di lickle wage packit
fus dem rab it wid dem big tax rackit
y’u haffi struggle fi mek en’s meet
an’ w’en y’u goh a y’u bed y’u jus’ cant sleep
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch fi true
a noh lie mi a tell, a true
mi use to work dig ditch w’en it cowl noh bitch
&nb
sp; mi did strang like a mule, but, bwoy, mi did fool
den awftah a while mi jus’ stap dhu ovahtime
den awftah a while mi jus’ phu dung mi tool
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
y’u haffi know how fi suvvive in it
well mi dhu day wok an’ mi dhu nite wok
mi dhu clean wok an’ mi dhu dutty wok
dem seh dat black man is very lazy
but if y’u si how mi wok y’u woulda sey mi crazy
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
y’u bettah face up to it
dem have a lickle facktri up inna Brackly
inna disya facktri all dem dhu is pack crackry
fi di laas fifteen years dem get mi laybah
now awftah fifteen years mi fall out a fayvah
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no runnin’ whey fram it
mi know dem have work, work in abundant
yet still, dem mek mi redundant
now, at fifty-five mi gettin’ quite ol’
yet still, dem sen’ mi fi goh draw dole
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch fi true
is whey wi a goh dhu ’bout it?
LINTON KWESI JOHNSON
The Orchids at Cwm y Gaer
Now, disbelieving, I will go
Down a road so narrow
I must travel sideways
Though still the willows will swat me with their swags of rain
And my own sweat tighten under my arms
As once my father’s fingers did.
Step carefully
For here they are,
Newborn but already white with webs.
Once the superstitious thought
It was Christ’s blood that mottled the leaves,
But now it’s as easy to suppose
That these eruptions, under a shadow’s anglepoise,
Are uranium rods
Broken through from the terrible core.
We build our legends;
We build our gods;
But how does a people understand its gods?
These might be such, thrusting up
Like the pillars of the reactor,
Their alpha-love kissing our skin,
Their gamma-love passing through our bones
To leave their ghosts forever hidden in our chromosomes.
We are people who worships gods
Whose mouths gasp electric,
whose eyes
Are a dull, totalitarian
Gold, whose commerce is strange
As a rockpool’s
pornography.
I pause one moment
On this narrow road
With the light tipping out of a tree’s tundish
And the spiders at their riot after rain.
Already a thread hangs from my hair
And ties me to this place.
So I open my hands to the orchids at Cwm y Gaer
And count each breath.
How long before the welts appear?
How soon before the cradle of nightsweats,
Or that deep, enriched delirium, dark as dew?
ROBERT MINHINNICK
Cousin Coat
You are my secret coat. You’re never dry.
You wear the weight and stink of black canals.
Malodorous companion, we know why
It’s taken me so long to see we’re pals,
To learn why my acquaintance never sniff
Or send me notes to say I stink of stiff.
But you don’t talk, historical bespoke.
You must be worn, be intimate as skin,
And though I never lived what you invoke,
At birth I was already buttoned in.
Your clammy itch became my atmosphere,
An air made half of anger, half of fear.
And what you are is what I tried to shed
In libraries with Donne and Henry James.
You’re here to bear a message from the dead
Whose history’s dishonoured with their names.
You mean the North, the poor, and troopers sent
To shoot down those who showed their discontent.
No comfort there for comfy meliorists
Grown weepy over Jarrow photographs.
No comfort when the poor the state enlists
Parade before their fathers’ cenotaphs.
No comfort when the strikers all go back
To see which twenty thousand get the sack.
Be with me when they cauterise the facts.
Be with me to the bottom of the page,
Insisting on what history exacts.
Be memory, be conscience, will and rage,
And keep me cold and honest, cousin coat,
So if I lie, I’ll know you’re at my throat.
SEAN O’BRIEN
Aubade
It’s all the same to morning what it dawns on –
On the bickering of jackdaws in leafy trees;
On that dandy from the wetlands, the green mallard’s
Stylish glissando among reeds; on the moorhen
Whose white petticoat flickers around the boghole;
On the oystercatcher on tiptoe at low tide.
It’s all the same to the sun what it rises on –
On the windows in houses in Georgian squares;
On bees swarming to blitz suburban gardens;
On young couples yawning in unison before
They do it again; on dew like sweat or tears
On lilies and roses; on your bare shoulders.
But it isn’t all the same to us that night-time
Runs out; that we must make do with today’s
Happenings, and stoop and somehow glue together
The silly little shards of our lives, so that
Our children can drink water from broken bowls,
Not from cupped hands. It isn’t the same at all.
NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL
translated by Michael Longley
From the Irish
According to Dineen, a Gael unsurpassed
in lexicographical enterprise, the Irish
for moon means ‘the white circle in a slice
of half-boiled potato or turnip’. A star
is the mark on the forehead of a beast
and the sun is the bottom of a lake, or well.
Well, if I say to you your face
is like a slice of half-boiled turnip,
your hair is the colour of a lake’s bottom
and at the centre of each of your eyes
is the mark of the beast, it is because
I want to love you properly, according to Dineen.
IAN DUHIG
Phrase Book
I’m standing here inside my skin,
which will do for a Human Remains Pouch
for the moment. Look down there (up here).
Quickly. Slowly. This is my own front room
where I’m lost in the action, live from a war,
on screen. I am an Englishwoman, I don’t understand you.
What’s the matter? You are right. You are wrong.
Things are going well (badly). Am I disturbing you?
TV is showing bliss as taught to pilots:
Blend, Low silhouette, Irregular shape, Small,
Secluded. (Please write it down. Please speak slowly.)
Bliss is how it was in this very room
when I raised my body to his mouth,
when he even balanced me in the air,
or at least I thought so and yes the pilots say
yes they have caught it through the Side-Looking
Airborne Radar, and through the J-Stars.
I am expecting a gentlema
n (a young gentleman,
two gentlemen, some gentlemen). Please send him
(them) up at once. This is really beautiful.
Yes they have seen us, the pilots, in the Kill Box
on their screens, and played the routine for
getting us Stealthed, that is, Cleansed, to you and me,
Taken Out. They know how to move into a single room
like that, to send in with Pinpoint Accuracy, a hundred Harms.
I have two cases and a cardboard box. There is another
bag there. I cannot open my case – look out,
the lock is broken. Have I done enough?
Bliss, the pilots say, is for evasion
and escape. What’s love in all this debris?
Just one person pounding another into dust,
into dust. I do not know the word for it yet.
Where is the British Consulate? Please explain.
What does it mean? What must I do? Where
can I find? What have I done? I have done
nothing. Let me pass please. I am an Englishwoman.
JO SHAPCOTT
I swear
Because I turned up from Bombay
too prissy to be rude
because you arrived via Leeds and Burnley
you thought it would do me good
to learn some Language. So
you never just fell, you went arse over tits,
and you were never not bothered
you just couldn’t be arsed, and when
you laughed you laughed like an effing drain
and when there was pain it was a pain
in the arse.
That was just the start: you taught me
all the Language you knew
The Map and the Clock Page 42
