Connacht

Once again, I am homing in
on a landscape that is abstract
and generous, a photographic
collage whose cut edges merge
into the myth of perfect
childhood, a gloss of kinship;

till all our visits to country
cousins, whose lyric speech
made changelings of our tongues,
are now subsumed into one
floating summer, still
luminous above those hills.

An English nowhere could make
no claim on loyalty, when we left
behind each year its grid
of neat, pragmatic streets,
its ordinary day a dullness
that had shrugged off history.

How we hammed an identity
and hugged it close like homespun
before each death and marriage
unstitched its flimsy threads -
knowing now that Eden
is only a fierce nostalgia.

 
Ascendants
i.m of John and James Cooke

On parade in perfect step -
my father and my father's brother,
down some big street in Dublin,
where a breeze is freshening,
and the nineteen fifties
are loitering round the corner.
And though I've no way now
of asking either how they spent 
the day, or what claim
each felt he'd a right to make
on an open-handed future,
it's sharp they are in Sunday suits
straight out of the movies.

Beyond that city I can just make out
a cramped, pre-electric house,
where shadows swarm each evening,
and then the lane unwinding
through a bramble-obscured neutrality.
But these two, like shrewd apostles
will leave for good a place
they'll later remember as home,
reiterating one simple text:
Self-help and Profit, a need for work
I'd like to think can't own me.

And now they inhabit an abstract
space to become such symbols
as I might choose to make them,
leaving much unanswered:
like who it was controlled 
the shutter on that buoyant day.
A brother in Philadelphia?
- The disembodied voice
I heard on the phone years back,
who could have been my father,
or my London uncle, through
a hoaxing midwest accent.

 
The Gift
i.m. Peter McManus

Speeches from the Dock: another book
that I've never found time to read -
though I picked up a copy years ago
to leave one summer as a parting gift
for that affable authentic old man
who, tolerant of clatter, used to let us
rule his roost. 
                       Tall stories, fields,
politics: his talk was a warm anthology
that told us where we came from,
that here it was we belonged;
and that the past was names
enshrined in pages of a martyrology.
Wolf Tone, Emmet, Casement: through his eyes
I try to imagine them all again,
each shade impassioned, eloquent, 
as they hold their accusers spellbound,
raw syllables streaming in a classical flood.
Our past was a landscape perfected
in memory, where each tree
is rooted, solitary and firm.


The Master Builders

They made a prayer out of balanced stone,
the improbable height of a spire -
as if by risking Babel's curse
they'd glimpse the gates of a factual 
heaven. The Truth was a presence,
palpable and massive, their skill 
an arrogance made to serve it
with mathematical certainty.

In the shuffling parishes time
dragged, bogged down in the tick
of generations, while elsewhere
violence spragged the ordered fractions 
of a working day, and trailed
behind it corpses, smoking fields
of discord getting nowhere.

Vanitas.  Designs and frayed ambition
all that's new beneath the sun.
Yet pride, too, raised each edifice
above its echoing pit;
and took the measure of stone
and dressed it, hoisting it up
until it soared like logic
into the high, unanswering air.

Chicago's South Side
A photograph from the Thirties

In this picture of a Chicago slum,
snapped by a lens whose eager eye was sweet
on dereliction, there isn't a soul at home -
unless inside they've closed the doors
to exclude all trite concern.

Their silence hangs like the aftermath
of a long slow blues, when a single
crudely amplified note has bruised the smoky air.

No signs of life in their rubble garden,
unlit by the dreariest tint of green,
or flap of washing or tattered curtains,
disrupt an image of abject stasis.

Ground floor windows are boarded up,
and wires hang slack like obsolete rigging
against a colourless sky, where chimneys
balance, fixed in a rickety equilibrium.

Chicago, Detroit, New York -
big cities shine like easy money
at the end of a dusty rainbow.

 
A Northern Resort

That tacky parade of gift shops,
amusements, and cheap cafés,
still touting for Sunday strollers,
confronts an expanse of winter sea

with a chirpy faith
in its permanence: a structure 
raised in an age of cagey virtues
as a pleasure-ground for low pay.

When the first trains
clattered in, a skylight opened up
in the miners' vaulted dark;
and straight-laced locals

staked a claim
in gifts accrued from Progress:
a pier, and a neat stone prom
giving shape to a coast

that drifts, a definition
so that work might leave its mark.
But summers here were duds,
and money seeks a florid climate.

A baroque of shells and gimcrack
won't bring those heydays back -

their awkward, dead smiles
buried in faded snaps.