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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781780373676 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloodaxe Books |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 331 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
ALTAR BOY
I cycle to town, rehearsing the Latin responses:
'Damn quell toffee cat, you've a tutta may.'
'Me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy.'
I don my surplice and soutane,
ring the hand-bell and follow the priest onto the altar. The congregation stand.
I am the half-priest, perfectly on cue for the next forty minutes. Old Mrs Cassidy tells me I'm a 'great cub'. I know this already.
ALTAR BOY ECONOMICS
A wedding paid better than a funeral.
We were tipped for smiling and looking cute in photos.
Though sometimes a funeral paid better,
the mourners at a loss and wanting to be thought generous.
Wedding tips could be displayed with a discreet jingle, but funeral tips were almost secrets, hoarded for rainy days.
A christening did not require an altar boy.
Christenings were, economically speaking,
a dead loss.
1959–1960
At twelve I am spilling poems into tiny notebooks.
There is not a line in the Ambleside Book of Verse
that I have not read.
I'm in a hurry all day, every day.
I can hardly keep up with myself at study, at play. When I affect a bookish silence all winter under the Tilley,
my mother, too, is silent in her unease.
THE CASH RAILWAY
The annual bus trip to Enniskillen to buy a school blazer ends in Ferguson's, gents' outfitter,
with the little cable-car of cash they call the Cash Railway whirring up the wire to the office on the first floor,
its companion descending at the exact same speed.
At the point where the two cross there is nothing in the world that is off balance or out of sync.
You want to loiter there for the next hour and shout 'Bravo'
at every round of funicular perfection.
But your mother is at the door,
lopsided with shopping,
reminding you that she has only two hands.
THE NATIONAL ANTHEM
Sinead feigned her fall.
A toffee girl, a gay run.
Binned. Arse. Loo.
Hard tune the hen-egg ruined.
Nil fuck-all Gaelige againn,
yet up we stand, the tricolour unfurls,
and we belt out the impassioned nonsense we have learned by heart.
We think we know where we stand,
which side we'll be on when the meaning becomes clear.
THE FIELDS
Where I grew up the fields had names,
The Brown Ground, The Brick-hole,
The Moss Bottom.
Earthed, each one,
in our practical affections.
NEDDY
1
After much thought, the Cassidys named their donkey 'Ned' or 'Neddy'.
He was grey all over, as donkeys ought to be and had never, so far as was known, broken into a trot.
Too small to be called 'stately', he took the prize for being patiently immobile. When we dressed him for work,
not a grey muscle moved until he was attired in blinkers, hames and bellyband,
then reversed between the shafts of the cart.
This was when Neddy blossomed, like a grey rose.
If he had an ego it shone invisibly on the main road,
in the public eye, when a donkey could aspire to cartwork of the highest order.
2
Released at the end of the day into an empty field beside the farmhouse,
Neddy perfected the skills of idleness.
If you approached, he looked at you standing there as though you were travelling too fast,
or were, somehow, in his unblinkered view, not grey enough.
3
Nobody told us immediately about Neddy's death,
or his burial in the woods. He made a slow exit from our lives, being not-there daily until we accepted that he would never return.
He was replaced by a grey tractor that managed ten times his working speed but didn't have a name.
SNOW ON THE WAY
The snow is in Olympian mode,
settling only on the mountains. Soon,
it will be cold enough for its residency in the garden, its sorcery among the branches.
THE FOX
Tree-silence, field-silence, snow-silence welcome the fox to the edge of the plantation.
He is not surprised to see us but nothing will break that unblinking wariness. His narrow head contains us, his eyes harbour the glint of inhospitable winters. Nothing to be feared or gained,
he takes himself off, loping close to the hedge,
his hollow stomach gathering a fringe of snow.
We plunge and scatter home to announce the fox.
Will he be back tonight in search of our kitchen waste?
Is he cunning enough to avoid the gamekeeper's traps?
We'll stay awake, listening for his bark.
OWLS
I am mesmerised by a gallery of roosting owls in a child's compendium of birds.
Their eyes are ten floodlights in a wood.
You'd think their lives must be a mardi gras,
so richly feathered, so groomed to be at odds with darkness.
The invisible owls of boyhood, a secret of the groves,
come back to me, the mighty wingspan thrown, in my dreams,
across a tight clearing with no imagined escape.
Those claws disturb me still with their casual hint of heraldic bloodshed. If these are wise owls,
what form does their wisdom take?
How did such handsome birds ever evolve into nocturnal predators, their beaks turned down to keep their victims in sight, their wings soundless?
Though they are thought of as ominous,
not everything in the lore of owls is freighted with bad luck. Pliny the Elder records that owls' eggs are a cure for hangovers ...
DO YOU RENOUNCE?
We stumbled early into the cold shower of penitence and self-denial,
encouraged to think of life as a Vale of Tears and ourselves as exiles.
Though deemed to have reached the Age of Reason, we were too young to grasp that the World, the Flesh and the Devil were a lot to renounce without a trial run. Nor did it occur that what we had renounced that day we might embrace fervently the next.
Through the red door to excess,
there was sport to be had,
or so it was whispered.
But we were crusaders then, zealously at war with the monstrous trinity.
'Do you renounce?' roared the Bishop.
'Do you renounce?' roared the Priest.
'We do! We do! We do!'
INOCULATION
The last polio child in the parish is dying indoors,
or parked on the front step in a wheelchair.
Passing, we wave thoughtlessly from the country of the immune,
those circles on our arms
— ring-forts, earthworks —
healing into the skin.
THE GANG
At the Parish Carnival we are attracted first to the sparky aggro of the bumping cars.
The jokes are all about fart-lighting and being rammed up the arse. Really we are keeping an eye on the tattooed specimen from Belfast who bounces unerringly from car to car, untangling the knot when all the girls drive into the same corner at the same time. They shriek and do it again.
He frees them again. We fume and say nothing.
He is rumoured to be a boxer and we are afraid.
Barely deigning to take us under his notice, he performs, again and again the ballet of the bumping cars. We say 'Right! Right!'
and leave him to it and, with territory still to be won,
stop at the rifle-range and shoot dead some wooden rabbits. At the ring-throwing stall,
somebody wins a doll and has to hide it under his jacket as a present for his sister.
Well dare anyone challenge us now!
The town is ours, the night is ours, we lay claim to the stars.
DIVERSION
There are twelve signposts at the crossroads on one vertical pole, the signpost tree.
Sometimes, for devilment, we turn the tree half-circle, then settle to watch strangers, sure of their destination, now doubly sure,
disappear trustingly down the road to nowhere or the road to somewhere else.
OMAGH
'You'll land me in Omagh,'
my mother groans,
at her wit's end.
Omagh is where the birdies are.
The out-of-mind drift out of sight a while,
then back among us.
It is said that madness runs in families.
We mooch around our gate and think of it travelling at speed in the shape of Miss Carty,
who, home again,
has joined the Dippers and cycles the main road in suspenders and knickers.
RHODODENDRONS
Or, as we said, 'rosydandrums',
never having seen the written word.
Privileged along the avenue to the castle they trumpeted colour, were evergreen and privileged again in the offseasons when they held themselves in wait for the next sumptuous budding.
Patrician growths. We had no urge to climb them or hide under their skirts. What would we do with such extravagance, such ostentatious flowering?
We planted five modest slips on the patch of grass between the house and the main road.
If bushes could look embarrassed ... We kept them there as better than nothing to embellish the view.
Shabby in the sun, poor cousins in the rain,
they succumbed at last to the football we kicked among them and the main road's dust, between showers, on their generous leaves.
RUTS
Cart-wide, tractor-wide,
the ruts spanning our lanes were scored with an ugly beauty.
Whether they were a hard pattern underfoot or whether we picked our steps delicately between the lines,
they hold in the memory as a carved track of our working days,
a rough signature. When the rain turned them into watery trenches where we might bog to the ankle,
we learned how to resist that suck and pull and could stamp in them for fun,
emerging foot-soaked and spattered,
the print of our soles everywhere in the mud,
on the wet doorstep, on the linoleum, on the kitchen floor.
UNAPPROVED ROADS
There must have been dozens cutting through border fields,
of which no one kept track,
or appearing on maps, if at all,
like a fine craquelure that might have been part of the fabric.
So for miles, there was no border,
just smugglers' routes and stony C roads,
potholed and dangerous.
I imagined a petrol tanker dipping its lights at the mouth of some nameless turn-off,
and trailers tilting with cigarettes and guns,
and cash changing hands in the country dark beyond the tarred roads we lived beside, the once-a-day patrols that kept our lives in order.
STORMS
The wind has a million leaves.
Though we have never heard the sea,
in storms the woods are oceanic.
* * *
Branches crack and one tree has fallen.
If the wind gets loose from the plantation,
the house will capsize.
* * *
This landscape is all stillness and innocent growth.
It never expected the angry storm-dog snarling out of the sky.
* * *
If there are owls in the plantation,
they stay silent and out of sight —
unless their cries are swallowed by the storm.
* * *
Nature at war. By dawn the casualties litter the main road, or hang in the trees,
or lie ruined in the fields.
* * *
The storm is no match for the chestnut tree,
which choreographs every gust as it arrives,
improvises all night.
* * *
The river in spate, the fields along the river lakes within hedges. The whole landscape sodden and out of shape.
* * *
In less than a minute it is in my eyes,
my hair, my mouth: an apprentice blizzard,
wind-muscled, crazy, packed with the darkness of snow.
LOSS OF SOUND
Thinking of ways he might express himself,
the Creator turned off the sound of the snow.
Overnight, the silence of snow became the silence of the Creator.
THE WOODPILE
If there were snakes left in Ireland this is where they would live,
on the sheltered side of the shed,
under an old tarpaulin,
pinned to the ground by two concrete blocks.
We work our way inwards all winter to the centre of the pile,
then outwards again,
the hatchet never done splitting and trimming,
until at last the woodpile,
down to its first logs, reveals the spring's pale grasses,
curled and about to uncurl in even the weakest sunlight,
settling already into the excitement of their new skins.
SNOWDROP
Somewhere in the snowfield,
the joyous, slow burial of the snowdrop in the snow.
LANDSCAPE WITH ENDANGERED SPECIES
How were we to know that the corncrake and the red squirrel were dying out —
the bush-tailed gymnast shaping his final flourish,
that throat raking the cornfields sick and sore with the music of last things?
UNFINISHED MUSIC
Snipe and curlew fashion on the wing,
unwittingly, in separate languages,
notes towards a definition of place.
They practise, in isolation, the raw sounds of an appropriate music.
Indifferently, in the long silences, the land absorbs the echo of
'Dirge for Snipe and Curlew',
which begins again daily and will never be finished.
TOWARDS A SKETCH OF MY MOTHER
She peers into her brown purse.
I watch her fingers picking at loose change.
* * *
I think of her breathing in, a wincing sound.
Smoke whispers from her little sizzling mound of Potter's Asthma Remedy.
* * *
A mouth full of clothes pegs, two neat lines of shirts, jumpers, underwear flapping wetly.
Her thrifty collaboration with the wind.
* * *
Laid out for burial she embodies,
then disembodies her eighty-three years.
Nothing more to be said of her that is not in the past tense.
What is said will keep open for a time the memories through which she will be forgotten.
AFTER A STORM
There is never enough snow.
It falls short always of the original snow-plain,
the refinement of the last layer,
the soundless, pale settling of the next.
A ZEN DREAM OF FERMANAGH
It rained almost daily, almost daily the rained-on complained. Had we known about the spirit of Zen we might have gathered on the Lough shore to welcome the deluge,
chanting refrains to keep, say, intolerance on the move,
if only to the next parish.
I picture whole families practising Zen in a wet field on the outskirts of Kesh,
or prone by a sacred sheugh on the road to Belleek.
In my daydream Fermanagh has been named the first Zen county in Ireland.
We, the denizens, relish the healing cloudburst and work our watery wiles for the benefit of all.
But to us rainfall was rainfall, bad weather.
The sooner it drained into the earth,
the sooner we were in tune with familiar patterns:
dark clouds, first spittle, the rush for shelter in a place where it rained almost daily and almost daily the rained-on complained.
MY FATHER AGAIN
I might have been born to write your elegy.
The moment I lift my pen your soft knock will be heard at the door. For fifty years or more you have been my work-in-progress.
I know what brings you here:
the hope that this time I'll produce a real poem —
The Ballad of Paddy Ormsby.
A singer will learn it by heart and after the to-and-fro of gruff persuasion and ritual demur,
will hang his cap on his knee, close his eyes,
and sing it to a crowded bar.
It will, you imagine, portray you as hero of sideline brawls,
the man to have on your side when the fists fly.
Your self-esteem will surely rattle the roof as the last note of homage fills the room with whoops and whistles.
But it's my elegy too, half-darkened with loss.
You'll get no ballad this time either.
So again you plunge into the unshaping night.
I slip the latch. Already you are out of sight.
THE FARMYARD HAIKU
1
Tight-arse, waddler,
I astound you with the perfection of my eggs.
2
Disgruntled in the muck we will never make music.
Who gives a fuck?
3
I'm Picky, I'm Choosy.
We're the wife's favourites.
She calls us by name.
4
Wattle, glottal, gobble:
we need sub-titles,
even among ourselves.
5
This gander has standards.
You won't catch me riding my wives in the street.
6
Balls the size of mine can only be compared to balls the size of mine.
7
I am the banty rooster. Oversexed?
I'll say! By the way,
you're next.
Excerpted from "The Darkness Of Snow"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Frank Ormsby.
Excerpted by permission of Wake Forest University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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