Feet on the drawbar of his Ferguson
aching left hand holding the pale grey mudguard wing,
I listen to him describe a hen harrier
holding the dimming sky up over Eshbrack bog,
how the light plays on wet weathered shale, on deer sedge,
cowberry, ling heather, hare’s-tail tussocks, and moss.
Drumlins of clouds slidder across the skim-iced sky.
Breakneck winds pierce and prune hedges, hawthorn and gorse.
Tricky sunlight splinters on white silk cotton-grass
Gleaming like one-night snow. We skirt sheep-ford river.
His
mind’s a water-hen in the lakes of Bragan:
Bradáin
where he ate the salmon of knowledge;
Na Bléine Báine
where plights of love turned to gold;
He'd
caught ice-age lamprey and smooth white-claw crayfish,
and
griped at glibbery eels in Blackwater mud.
Poaching pike on Emy with a cut hazel rod,
with a brave-sized hide strip of rabbit’s tail as bait,
he'd hooked an olive lump, an eel’s head in its gut.
He remembers the breeze pawing the dimmed waters.
And oar-rippled waves sucking the planks of the boat.
He knew the beds in Emy lough where once pike lurked to pounce.
The plashy lough lap-lies in a fen-fringed hollow
between whaleback drumlins, where a sudden stern curve
of wood backs from the shore; there in the fearful fen
of willow hides an unseen dragon none talks of.
holds the bank against swollen wash-away waters.
He wants me to see the silver eels climbing falls,
gleaning the moon’s last light with their gleaming fins.
A curlew flies over a peaty scraw-fringed lough.
His eye catches the down-curve of its slender bill
in its act of becoming a long-legged wader.
This gyres his soul to speak of Greenland White-fronted
Geese on Glaslough lake, of blue-grey hook-billed Merlins,
and trilling Red Grouse. Now the tractor soodles on.
The moon's dance in the mirror defies diffusion.
He lived among the green silence of moorland grass,
and the rising glass-sheen of mirroring loughs in rain.
In his eel-mud mind Emyvale was Enchalon.
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