The last summer he walked slower, chose to linger.
Pausing in a laneway, he ran a thumb along the seam
of an old garden wall – ‘Those joints need pointing’
he warned; attentive, we saw in his face some strange
play of inward movement. On request we drove to Meath;
those fields a dozen times the size of his own
pleasured his eye. At Christmas leaning on the window sill,
lovingly, he gazed over a few loamy acres towards Gola.
In mid-January, cutting back briars, he fell with his scythe.

Several years later, I waken deep into the night,
hear you sobbing to yourself. It’s Patrick’s Eve,
that evening your father used return after
his winter exile, a labourer in Scotland; three
eager children watch the dark beyond Dunlewy.
Now, at last, the bus’s headlamps arc the sky
overjoyed you race the lights to meet him at Bunbeg.
Tonight, here by your side I listen, then kissing
your forehead, throw my arms around your sorrow.

(From A Fragile City)

All that has been still an undertone,
Frets of memory half-heard deep
Below a hybrid croon of saxophone

Or when King Oliver’s horn’s darker
Notes warn a plantation child
He’d die an obscure poolroom marker.

A Bushman taps a hunting bow,
One end humming between the lips,
Drone of sound mesmeric and hollow.

At wedding gigs East Europe’s blues
In moods of a harmonic minor scale
Blare a wistful klezmer rumpus.

Fingers strum a blown mukkuri
As swung against an Ainu’s hips
A song of peace plucks a tonkori.

Once Turk or Khan, Rome or Greece,
Empires now where suns never fall,
A dominant bringing a dominant peace.

But one space of chosen nodes,
Mediant world of both/and plays
In flexitime, in different modes?

Given riffs and breaks of our own,
Given a globe of boundless jazz,
Yet still a remembered undertone,

A quivering earthy line of soul
Crying in all diminished chords.
Our globe still trembles on its pole.

(From Globe)

Neat millions of pairs of abandoned shoes
Creased with mute presence of those whose

Faces both stare and vanish. Which ghetto?
Warsaw, Vilna, Lodz, Riga, Kovno.

Eight hundred dark-eyed girls from Salonica
Bony and sag-breasted singing the Hatikvah

Tread the barefoot floor to a shower-room.
Friedlnder, Berenstein, Menashe, Blum.

Each someone’s fondled face. A named few.
Did they hold hands the moment they knew?

I’ll change their shame to praise and renown in all
The earth… Always each face and shoeless footfall

A breathing memory behind the gossamer wall.

(From The Gossamer Wall)

1

I bring my basketful to serve
Our table. Everything mine is yours.
Everything. Without reserve.

Poems to which I still revert.
Gauguin. Matisse. Renoir’s pear-shaped women.
Music I’ve heard. Blessed Schubert.

Ecstasies I’ll never understand –
Mandelstam’s instants of splendour, the world
A plain apple in his hand.

Lost faces. Those whose heirs
I was. My print-out of their genes,
Seed and breed of forbears.

Whatever I’ve become – courtesy
Of lovers, friends or friends of friends.
All those traces in me.

The living and dead. My sum
Of being. A host open and woundable.
Here I am!

2

Tiny as a firefly under the night sky,
We try to imagine stars that travel
Two million light years to reach the eye.

Long ago on a stormy and starless night
Old people used keep a half-door opened,
Anyone passing could make for the light.

The Russian cosmonauts leaving after them
Bread and salt for the next to dock
At the station. Small symbols of welcome.
Who’s that outsider waiting for you?
We try to imagine how destinies unravel
Across the years towards their rendezvous.

A space for wanderers, lone or dispossessed.
At this table we’ve laid one empty place,
That old courtesy for the missing guest.

3

Never again just this.
Once-off. Ongoing wistfulness.
Wine loosening through my thighs.
Closeness. Our sudden huddle of intimacy.
These hours we’re citizens of paradise.

A nourishment of senses.
Such fierce delight tenses
Between affections and the moments
When, like a theatre after its applause,
This house will fall again to silence.

Let gaieties outweigh
Their own misgivings. Emigré
And native, my desire attends
The moment in and out of time
Which even when it ceases never ends.

I feed on such courtesy.
These guests keep countenancing me.
Mine always mine. This complicity
Of faces, companions, breadbreakers.
You and you and you. My fragile city.

(From A Fragile City)

Come again glistening from your morning shower
Half-coquettishly you’ll throw
Your robe at me calling out ‘Hello! Hello!’
I turn over stretching out to snatch
A bundle from the air and once more to watch
That parade across your bower.
Jaunty, brisk, allegro,
Preparing improvisations of yet another day
As on our first morning twenty-seven years ago.

Sit on the bed-end and pull a stocking on,
Slip that frock over your head
Let it slither a little, ride your hips, then spread
Its folds and tumbles, flopping past those thighs
To swish against your ankles. I’m still all eyes.
The thrill and first frisson
At the half-known but unsaid,
At hints and contours embodied in a dance of dress
I’m ogling snugly from this your still warm bed.

Now you’re hurrying, business-like and ready to go.
I wonder if I’ve ever glimpsed you
Or if all those years I even as much as knew
Behind those hints and suggestions I admire
What inmost aim or dream or heart’s desire
Calls out ‘Hello, Hello!’
Flirt and peekaboo
Of such unwitting closeness, our take-for-grantedness,
Complex web of intimacies where we slowly grew.

Sometimes wells of aloneness seem almost to imbue
Your silence with the long wistful rubato
Of a Chopin nocturne or is it a seannós tremelo?
‘Má bhíonn tú liom bí liom, gach orlach den tslí
If you’re mine be mine, each inch of the way with me’
That infinite longing in you
A girl racing to follow
The bus’s headlamps to meet your father at Bunbeg.
He steps down from the platform. Hello! Hello!

You smile your father’s inward Zen-like smile.
And yet its light shines outward
As when I watched you helping a child to word
The coy, swaggering pleasure of new shoes,
A muse the more a muse in being a muse.
That inward outward smile
Delights in delight conferred,
Fine-tuning those strains and riffs of wishes unspoken,
Desires another’s heart doesn’t yet know it has heard.

Now I see you, now I don’t. The doubt
And loneness of what’s always new,
Moments seized in double time, love’s impromptu,
As when late last night you started telling me
How even as a girl you’d known your dream would be
Bringing others’ dreams about.
This once I think I glimpsed you,
You my glistening, lonely, giving Mistress Zen.
Thank you. Thank you for so many dreams come true.

(From Our Double Time)