Upper Ballyroe, Kilfinnane, 1968.

Upper Ballyroe, Kilfinnane

1968, the Uncle’s farm

(County Limerick, Ireland)

We stand and watch the rain.

The sloping field
strikes loose its waters
rides them down
to pools of mahogany gumbo.

The hayricks are what’s left
when mountains unbuckle their splendours
fall by fall.  Their crowns cave and suck.

Chemistry happens.  The rotten stem
swaddles the firm.

One of us is leant against a tree,
swelling its black scars
with crooked breath, head stuck
in last night’s fuddle.

His free hand wags at his hip,
a cigarette strung on its fingers.

Someone forecasts: brighter than scrubbed beans
come teatime.  Then we’ll get on.
Fecksakes, the cig flares back at him,

it’s torrents now, well into the boozing hour
and down to the heel of tomorrow besides.

We’ll see the summer out forking blancmange,
and where were the bloody tarps?

The tarps are asleep,
interfolded like sofa cats
in the barn we walked past hours ago,
swatting off the sun . . .

. . . which someone else swears he’s glimpsed,

just, way and gone over the field:

a finger of it laid underside
the gapping wounds of cloud.

Ah, he insists, it’ll turn for us now.

But it has business
with cliffs and trawling-roads.

It slithers off (Fecksakes)--another kind of cat,
squeezing up space for itself
under the sag of a dresser,
or with the last of retreat up its tail
as a window unratchets and slams.

From Batmans Hill, South Staffs (London: Flipped Eye, 2013)