Art McCooey

I recover now the time I drove
Cart-loads of dung to an outlying farm –
My foreign possessions in Shancoduff –
With the enthusiasm of a man who sees life simply.

The steam rising from the load is still
Warm enough to thaw my frosty fingers.
In Donnybrook in Dublin ten years later
I see that empire now and the empire builder.

Sometimes meeting a neighbour
In country love-enchantment,
The old mare pulls over to the bank and leaves us
To fiddle folly where November dances.

We wove our disappointments and successes
To patterns of a town-bred logic:
‘She might have been sick…’ ‘No, never before,
A mystery, Pat, and they all appear so modest.’

We exchanged our fool advices back and forth:
‘It easily could be their cow was calving,
And sure the rain was desperate that night…’
Somewhere in the mists a light was laughing.

We played with the frilly edges of reality
While we puffed our cigarettes;
And sometimes Owney Martin’s splitting yell
Would knife the dreamer that the land begets.

‘I’ll see you after Second Mass on Sunday.’
‘Right-o, right-o.’ The mare moves on again.
A wheel rides over a heap of gravel
And the mare goes skew-ways like a blinded hen.

Down the lane-way of the popular banshees
By Paddy Bradley’s; mud to the ankles;
A hare is grazing in Mat Rooney’s meadow;
Maggie Byrne is prowling for dead branches.

Ten loads before tea-time. Was that the laughter
Of the evening bursting school?
The sun sinks low and large behind the hills of Cavan,
A stormy-looking sunset. ‘Brave and cool.’

Wash out the cart with a bucket of water and a wangel
Of wheaten straw. Jupiter looks down.
Unlearnedly and unreasonably poetry is shaped,
Awkwardly but alive in the unmeasured womb.