第6章 The Strand at Lough Beg

IN MEMORY OF COLUM MCCARTNEY

All round this little island, on the strand

Far down below there, where the breakers strive,

Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.

Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100–103

Leaving the white glow of filling stations

And a few lonely streetlamps among fields

You climbed the hills towards Newtownhamilton

Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars –

Along that road, a high, bare pilgrim's track

Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,

Goat-beards and dogs' eyes in a demon pack

Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.

What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?

The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling

Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?

Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights

That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down

Where you weren't known and far from what you knew:

The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,

Church Island's spire, its soft treeline of yew.

There you used hear guns fired behind the house

Long before rising time, when duck shooters

Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,

But still were scared to find spent cartridges,

Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,

On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.

For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy,

Spoke an old language of conspirators

And could not crack the whip or seize the day:

Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round

Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,

Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.

Across that strand of yours the cattle graze

Up to their bellies in an early mist

And now they turn their unbewildered gaze

To where we work our way through squeaking sedge

Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge

Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze.

I turn because the sweeping of your feet

Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees

With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,

Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass

And gather up cold handfuls of the dew

To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss

Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.

I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.

With rushes that shoot green again, I plait

Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.