I had a mate called Snot
who had a sister called Chris
and their Da was shot
on 1st September 1986
(all names and dates have been altered).
Long ago, I’m sure, I forgot
the details and I don’t consciously reminisce
but dream and dream again of that summer.
There were seven girls on our estate
and to follow the thread
of their chatter was to be reduced to a state
by seven bobbing heads
as they nattered—perched on low
walls or behind hedgerows
in McGarrigan’s fields—headspun
and swept up by their twittered-chittered song.
You might say our town was a steaming brown
turd of a place with a Chinese, chippies,
graffiti, hairdressers, offies, closed-down
offices, bookies, more graffiti,
pool hall, nine pubs and video
library with posters of Chuck Norris videos.
On fair nights the seven girls perched in the town
square like birds. Twitching. Looking around.
On 31st August 1986
we headed for the duck pond,
the blushed sky tongued with scarlet licks.
Chris led me away from the rest
to the blue-tinged shelter of high fronds
and when she kissed me soft and long a
host of sparrows glided from the dark crest
of Scrabo over the vale of Kiltonga.
She raised herself, and I followed her under
hazels, down a path of wych elms,
their long shadows. I followed through a blur
of foxglove, columbine, tall ferns,
the trickle of a brook, under the whirr
of a far-off helicopter’s rotors.
And now I hear the telephone ring
shrill and short the next morning,
the vacuum it brings; but right then
I followed her through dog-walk lanes,
scrub, empty fields and wasted glens
to where lead mines stretched for acres,
where we came across an old knacker
sat bolt upright on a deckchair
by an oil drum in the middle of nowhere
in particular, watching us draw near.
As we walked past in a slow motion haze
he mouthed an undecodable refrain
with hay in his beard and burning eyes,
spitting out his mantra again and again
in a fury of midges and horseflies.
And the discombobulation I felt in his gaze,
out of body and undermined,
was how I’d come to feel most of the time.
She kissed me, then walked off under darkened leaves
and I stood still, watching her leave.
And I wish she wandered broad and far
to that point on the horizon
where sky and sea become one,
where she wrapped the sky around her
like a blue cotton shawl and danced upon the waves.
But she went home to Ballycullen.
I’ve not been down that way since.
Nothing of those times can be changed
although their connotations constantly change
and I can’t pin them down: my words like dust
as if ears of grain gleaned long before
by someone else, leaving only dry husks.
Do what I might, the mind implores
I stand there still, seeking a glimpse
of ribbon-braided hair. I reach out
and clutch at hollows—the telephone
ringing, red eyes, bilious refrains
in the ear, wilted columbine, foxglove,
fallen hazels, the constant spout
of a hidden brook purling through my brain.
And memory is looking on as love
walks off down a darkened green lane.