ancestral

The ice sheets tore welts in the earth,

Like six furry spodeks – the Comeraghs.

The sea churned gravel-raking storms.

The rain stirred mud into the streams.

His ancestors planted their feet there.

Now, the keening of days sounds from the falls.

The branches of suspicious trees eye the valleys.

Where turf-smoke verses rent by the wind

Made banal prose of the pyre of his past,

The sheep have laid waste to the stone walls.

Lichened apple trees lament at the stream’s edge.

Bracken and thistles scratch my skin

In the fields that once were freshly ploughed,

Or pastured, as if I must expiate his degradation,

By planting seeds of redemption in the meadow.

I yank the front door and it shifts on its hinges.

The cottage walls stare at each other behind manky curtains.

In the pots and pans in the shadows I sense his life.

In the open-book fireplace his name is burnt.

Like windfall fruit his books are pulping in the press.

His raft crashed against the rocks of a harsh mantra:

A viable farm had to measure up as an economic unit.

He retreated like a gastropod into his lonely conch.

He lived on - killing time until time killed him.

I had forgotten that once I remembered him.

He laughed when I found the hens’ nests in the field

Where threshing left straw mattresses on the ground.

Economics laughed his life into the mountain’s clay.

The molten core of the earth warms his Nire grave.

But in the void he tumbled to the bottom of my mind.

The rays from the Nire river are razor blades in my eyes.

Under the bridge it foams white at the mouth.

A tree bleeds sap to mirror only the shades of the sky.

The clouds are mummies in buttermilk bandages.

A cat’s tail tempts it to whirl in circles on the flagstone.