Victoria Park, December

He heard while he sang and dreamed
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.
                        —W.B.Yeats, ’The Host of the Air’

We were still in the park when the music started —
choral, first seasonal hymns in the half-dark
of the bandstand, the pent-up warm-ups of brass
and pipes, four men neatly starched and collared,
a circle of singers. You went towards them enamoured,
and we stood two duffelled-lovers-dreaming
in the steady wind-fixed music, daydreaming,
each band of notes and chords a string in the stomach
pulling us like children pulled from Hamelin.
I dreamed of the day and the day’s slow happenings.
That morning my mother had called with news
about her ribs, the unseen bruising colouring inside her.
How is she so old, I asked myself, my voice
out loud, woken. You held me then,
and we forgot about the cold, how cold it gets,
each winter’s liturgy of frost-bit staupings
in the mud; brittle reeds, the bearded-heron
shivering by the lake; and the pipes erupting in our street,
Victorian leaden things suddenly frozen, broken.

An Invitation

from North Antrim
to my lover

after Thom Gunn

If, one day, you can visit me at home,
I’ll put you in the large well-lighted room
at my home’s front, where you will wake to sounds
of cattle moving to the barn, and winds
that circle, soothe and nurture the old house
(my too familiar winds) as a sharp douse
of winter magic shaking in the eaves.
From scalded pot, a sprinkle of fresh leaves,
I’ll bring you a strong cup of Irish tea,
and through the window we will watch the sea
get its mileage on the jagged basalt rocks,
and throw up foam, and toss the raft of ducks,
and sink its tapered fingers in the sand.
You will point at birds; I will take your hand.

And later we will head out to the fields
in welly boots, thick coats, where crispness bleeds
an auburn line on tree fenced boundaries,
a haze that makes the whole land seem to wheeze.
Then I’ll show you the castle at Carnkirk,
and in the fields we’ll watch the tractors work
the furrows from the ground, and we might chat
to men whose gruntled accents you won’t get,
their ’thons’ and ’sheughs’ totally beyond you.
Dunseverick, Bushmills, Lisnagunogue —
I’ll take you to the places that I know
as places from a life which somehow slowed
with history. I don’t think that we’ll linger,
for of course we’ll want a pub, a finger
of whiskey, a black pint, a cosy spot
somewhere in the nook, the snug, to eat hot
broth and watch the people come and laugh and talk
of pheasant shoots, depleting fishing stocks.

And then the walk home in the blackest dark,
to let our pathway be the timid marks
of beasts who followed wind-chill, moonlight, clocks
built in by nature. The back door unlocked
we’ll trudge through, kick off the mud. My dad will
have kindled up a fire, my mum will fill
the kettle for more tea. We’ll spend the night
there with them, in dozy heat, curled up tight
with books, working letters into puzzles
for new words: each consonant, each vowel.

The Moose

New England Road-Trip, 1999

My mum and I were dozing as he hit the brakes
somewhere on the roads between Squam Lake
and Lake Winnipesaukee (dozing in the heat
as dozers do when the journey’s long, streets
of one-road towns melted black, roadsides burnt
brown, weeds bursting from grey flints,
and inside the car the sweat of hard gums
and the same-same bass, pedal, drums
of local indy music, and the air con
up to its old tricks: If the window’s down
it doesn’t work pete’s sakes!) — he pushed
the brakes, the Corolla stopped, and the land hushed
around us, no wind in heat. Softly, my dad said
’moose’ like the first thing he’d uttered
for days, and there, sure enough, was the moose,
drolly crossing the highway, reclusive,
hornless, heavy with child. We were the one
car in fifty miles. The moose looked once
then slouched into the trees.
                                       What a summer
that was, NYC, Connecticut, New Hampshire,
just the three of us alone in the hired car,
skirting through forests, stopping at pool bars,
engulfing cafes, restrooms, shopping malls,
then the lakes and wide beaches, and motels
like a dream come true, all slatted white
and balconies on the water, birds in flight
and silent in the blueness, their taut accord.

Allowed to stay up late and play cards,
to choose where we went, have a few sips of wine,
and I properly got into boys for the first time,
watched them diving off the raft, young
bodies play-fighting, those swelling lungs.
I learnt to snorkel, to listen to my head
below the water, and we were so darn well fed
on platters, burgers, fries, that even I, skinny as skate,
managed to garner a stone in weight.

History is the patterns we make:
snatches of smiles, long-forgotten tastes, half-baked
murmurs at the back of the mind
that urge and tease, niggle into being. Determined,
we set out to rescue my sister from a Baptists’
soaking and found her insistent,
unwearied, a different person. I think I just
made that last bit up. I who then fussed
for accuracy. Forgive me, mother, father.
I do not know, I know all that I’ve gathered,
and it’s all been pressed, squeezed, sluiced.
But I’ll never forget that moose.

Green Men

Because of your broken toe, sharp-stubbed on the side
of the bed, and my flat-walker’s charm of a foot,
we limp, on my twenty-fifth birthday, through
the snow and across the bridge to the wetlands
at Walthamstow.
                      Shovelers, widgeons, little grebes —
we count these birds amongst the new ones on our list,
add to them the stonechats on the Marsh, the green
woodpecker living, somehow, by the stench of Dagenham Brook.
The air is still, and all around the ponds cling sheets of ice.

I often wonder how we got like this,
fully-binoculared members of our private club:
just you and me whispering across the cold air,
lifting the wooden windows of the hide
to peer at what might not be there, and only
might exist if we’re not spotted. We know
ducks don’t mind, of course, nor geese or coots,
but there was the stomach-sinking time I checked my watch
and missed the red-throated diver as it soared
with a rickety screech over our heads,
and I had to take your word for it.

I just had to take your word for it. My love,
the myth I always liked the most
was that of Featherboy, the Crow Indian
estranged and wandering in the desert
who followed — because he saw them and felt their call —
three birds towards a clearing filled with buffalo
and returned with the news to his starving tribe.

And as if it happened yesterday, or is happening right now,
I remember the morning we rose from the timidity and exhaustion
of the night and took the graveyard park
and read the names and noted gaps in years,
and shivered at the quietness of birds.

Like something nestled and defended and upheld:
when I guessed and guessed again the names of trees,
you gave me clues in bark-types and the shapes of leaves.

The Burial

Despite the fear, the knowing lurch of what he’d lost
and could in future lose, there was still the need.

He headed east in spring, Dunseverick, Ballintoy,
under the red bulk of Knocklayd, where the road

swerved through banks of mottled gorse, and the rock,
carved out like a piece of wood that’s lathed and turned,

produced the forest park where it had happened
fifteen years before: the unforgivable, taken

as a given. He bought an ice cream from the vendor
and asked himself, Am I remembered here? Or has

it been too long? He had stood there a thousand times,
it seemed, always when the light was high on the lip

of the glen, and the cold sent a shudder to the spine
and the wind would find its silence. For there was still

the need, to stand beneath the trees and smell the soil,
the furring bark, and watch the hedge-line redden

in the dusk. He closed his eyes and listened to the rustle
of the leaves up in the dark, and shivered as it all

came back to him: the unremarkable hatchbacks,
the pick-axe and the shovels, the way the earth turned

easily under the weight of his foot, the edge of the spade.
Then the smouldering unrest of the life he’d made.